"Proven Effective: the influence of pharmaceutical and medical products marketing on patient care and drug safety"

Sixteen billion dollars is the estimated amount that the pharmaceutical industry spends each year on marketing to influence the attitudes, knowledge and behaviors of physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and pharmacists in their prescribing for patients.

The goal of providers is to prescribe the most appropriate medication for patients. The goal of industry is to make sure that the medication prescribed is their product, whether or not it’s the optimal choice. Most of us getting information from pharmaceutical industry or its representatives consider ourselves immune to its influence. But the CEOs of these businesses are neither philanthropists nor stupid. The pharmaceutical industry conducts outcome studies on their advertising campaigns as they do now on their medications.

Our greatest concern is not the marketing practices of the pharmaceutical industry or the lobbying for them done by the pharmaceutical (drug) representatives, who are just doing their jobs. The question that we care most about is: how can we in the health care community become more aware of how our prescribing practices can be influenced by pharmaceutical marketing, in order to assure that we are practicing the best medicine for our patients?

The workshop will use slideshows, award winning videos and interactive exercises to relate information on direct to consumer adverting, direct marketing to health care professionals and industry sponsored research and continuing education.

By the end of this program participants will be able to:

1. Define Direct to Consumer Advertising (DTCA) & its impact on clinical practice
2. Describe an intentional communication approach to convert DTCA into an opportunity for better clinical practice
3. Use patient education tools to help patients be more informed consumers of pharmaceutical marketing
4. List techniques of persuasion used in promotional material by the pharmaceutical industry including free samples as an example
5. Explain the methods of influence by industry sponsored medical research including ghostwriting and seeding trials
6. Relate the approaches used in industry sponsored continuing education using the Vioxx information as an example

For detailed descriptions and to register for a workshop, please visit:
www.mebi.washington.edu/fdw