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 Britain's biggest drugmaker also said on Tuesday it would stop
payments to healthcare professionals for attending medical
conferences as it tries to persuade critics it is addressing
conflicts of interest that could put commercial interests ahead of
the best outcome for patients.
The move may force other companies to act, since the entire drugs
industry has been under fire for aggressive marketing tactics in
recent years.
"Where GSK leads we must hope that other companies will follow,"
Fiona Godlee, editor of the British Medical Journal and an
influential campaigner against undue industry influence in medical
practice, told Reuters.
"But there is a long way to go if we are to truly to extricate
medicine from commercial influence. Doctors and their societies have
been too ready to compromise themselves."
GlaxoSmithKline's move comes amid a major bribery investigation in
China, where police have accused it of funneling up to 3 billion
yuan ($494 million) to travel agencies to facilitate bribes to boost
its drug sales.
However, the company said the measures were not directly related to
its Chinese problems and were rather part of a broad effort to
improve transparency.
In the United States, the industry's biggest market by far, many
companies have run into conflicts over improper sales tactics and
GSK reached a record $3-billion settlement with the U.S. government
last year over charges that it provided misleading information on
certain drugs.
A number of other firms have taken some steps to clean up their
marketing practices and companies are being forced to disclose
payments to doctors under U.S. healthcare law.
Shares in GSK, which have been hit in recent months by its woes in
China and a resulting fall in sales, slid 1 percent against a 0.3
percent dip on London's blue-chip FTSE index.
SELF-REGULATION
AstraZeneca said in 2011 it was scrapping payments for doctors to
attend international congresses but others, until now, have not
followed suit and GSK's actions go further.
An AstraZeneca spokeswoman said on Tuesday it had tightened up
practices in 2011 so that its actions could not be seen as an
inducement for doctors to prescribe its products.
Officials at other major drug companies were not immediately
available to comment.
Tim Reed, head of Health Action International, an Amsterdam-based
non-government organization critical of Big Pharma, said the GSK
move would increase the pressure on other companies.
"I think other companies will follow suit — but one of the biggest
problems is that the industry persists in regulating itself," he
said. "The only way to properly control promotion is strong and
enforced regulation by the state."
GSK's Chief Executive Andrew Witty said in a statement that his
company's actions were designed to ensure that patients' interests
always came first.
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"We recognize that we have an important role to play in providing
doctors with information about our medicines, but this must be done
clearly, transparently and without any perception of conflict of
interest," he said.
The decision to stop payments to doctors for speaking about
medicines during meetings with other prescribers marks a big shift
for a global industry that has always relied heavily on the
influence of experts in promoting products.
GSK said it aimed to implement this move and a related measure to
end paying for doctors to attend medical conferences by the start of
2016.
The company currently spends some 50 million pounds ($82 million) a
year on paying doctors to speak or attend conferences, according to
estimates from industry sources.
U.S. MODEL
The change in payments to GSK's sales representatives will be
implemented faster, following a successful test-run in the United
States, where payments have been decoupled from the number of
prescriptions generated since 2011.
The policy of ending individual sales targets will now be rolled out
globally. GSK said it planned to implement the new compensation
system in all countries by early 2015.
Its U.S. ‘Patient First' program bases pay for commercial staff on a
mix of qualitative measures and the overall business performance,
rather than the number of prescriptions generated.
Vivienne Nathanson, head of science and ethics at the British
Medical Association, said this approach made sense for patient care.
"It is pleasing to see a large pharmaceutical company like
GlaxoSmithKline recognize that it can reduce the possibility of
undue influence by rewarding employees for providing high-quality
information and education for doctors rather than for their sales
figures," she said.
GSK will still pay fees to doctors carrying out company-sponsored
clinical research, advisory activities and market research, which it
said were essential in providing insights on specific diseases.
($1 = 6.0715 Chinese yuan)
($1 = 0.6136 British pounds)
(Additional reporting by Kate Kelland; editing by Sophie Walker)
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