During the COVID-19 pandemic, biopharmaceutical companies proactively interrupted face-to-face interactions between their representatives and physicians, in order to protect patients, healthcare professionals and their own employees have replaced in-office visits and face-to-face congresses with digital innovation in the pharma – virtual meetings, webinars, etc.
Overworked healthcare professionals are under high pressure, and a lot of patient programs have already stopped. On top of that most of the companies’ staff are asked to work remotely from home. Regarding pharma labs and the medical promotion the consequence is big, representative and medical scientific liaison are home based, events and congress are cancelled and healthcare practitioners workload is already full focusing on their patients.
In strangling traditional drug marketing, COVID-19 has, quite by accident, done what policy makers have for decades been unable to do. And just as the COVID-driven involuntary adoption of telehealth has led some providers to reassess the clinical value of some types of in-person office visits, so too should the severing of face-to-face industry contacts lead to re-evaluating whether much is lost by abandoning in-person sales visits.
With the shift to digital innovation in the pharma, promotion and detailing, policy makers should update their regulatory approaches. With video meetings and webinars, a quick mouse-click can record and document interactions. Firms could be required to record their virtual contacts so that institutions and regulators can periodically monitor interactions and content. Regulators could permit or even require the presence of a competitor to observe firm-sponsored digital events to enhance the market’s own internal discipline. New guidelines could be issued on the advertising of webinars to help physicians distinguish between purely promotional events and educational events. And new rules could be enacted to regulate the access that pharma e-detailing apps have to providers’ smartphones.
As the healthcare system adapts, so will the drug, device, and other industries that support and recast it. So too must regulators and all of us who have a stake in our nation’s health and the integrity of its health care system.
