Glaxo Will Stop Paying Doctors To Promote Its Medicines

In the latest bid to restore its damaged reputation, GlaxoSmithKline has promised to halt payments to doctors for promoting its drugs and is further revamping compensation for its sales reps, who will no longer be paid based on the number of prescriptions that are written by physicians, a practice that was implemented in the US three years ago (see here), but will now be extended globally. The policy changes come at a difficult time for the drugmaker. Last year, Glaxo agreed to plead guilty and pay $3 billion to resolve criminal and civil charges in connection with off-label promotion of several drugs, failing to report safety data and reporting false prices. At the time, Glaxo ceo Andrew Witty vowed the drugmaker had “learnt from the mistakes that were made” (back story). Since then, however, there have two more scandals, both in China. Glaxo has been the focus of a bribery scandal in which physicians and government officials were allegedly paid to boost prescriptions for its medicines (more here). And its former head of R&D in Shanghai was dismissed and other employees departed after learning that a scientific paper that was published in Nature Medicine contained fabricated data (look here). As a result, Glaxo (GSK) has been scrambling to contain the damage. The drugmaker has since launched a transparency campaign in which access to patient-level data from clinical trials will be made available to independent researchers (read...Read more
Source: Pharmalot - Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: Source Type: blogs