FDA Teaching Docs to Find Misleading Drug Promotions

Pharma and biotech sales (and training) leaders, take note: the FDA is actively training doctors to sniff out your transgressions and turn you in.

The FDA has recently launched an e-learning course in order to educate the medical community on misleading drug promotions.

From the FDA’s press release: The FDA’s Office of Prescription Drug Promotion announced Monday the launch, with MedScape, of the e-learning course, which offers continuing education credits for healthcare professionals. The course is part of Bad Ad, a program designed in 2010 to raise awareness about misleading and untruthful drug ads. It’s aimed at healthcare professionals, but anyone can take it, the agency said. The office has developed several case studies based on warning letters the FDA has sent to drug companies, representing common problems.

You can launch the course here (anyone, in fact, can go through it). The screen shot below shows the structure of the course:

Of particular interest is Module 5, where actors representing sales reps engage in questionable promotional practices to demonstrate violative sales tactics. This should be examined carefully by every commercial biopharma organization.

Hat tip to Corey Nahman for the heads-up.

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Running Out of Bandwidth

As I talk to many biopharma/medical device training directors, a common theme emerges over and over again.

Everyone’s out of bandwidth.

Headcount reductions in the training department have been a regular feature for the past few years in most companies. But somehow, the number of regular tasks and new initiatives doesn’t seem to go down. Only up.

I hear a lot of stressed voices.

Since I work a lot with vendor recommendations, outsourcing comes up frequently – but how do you outsource major training functions? We’re used to outsourcing the development (and/or delivery) of some specific training programs – but will we need to go further because of the chronic need for more bandwidth?

What do you think?

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Fresh Jobs in the Northeast

Occasionally, we’ll feature some open jobs that aren’t (yet) listed on the Impactiviti Job Board. Here are several openings with Sanofi-Aventis that might be of interest to our pharma network:

> District Sales Manager, Poughkeepsie, NY

> Field Sales, Philadelphia, PA

> Field Sales, Levittown, PA

And, here’s an interesting position in Salem NH, for a User Experience Designer (AgaMatrix). If you apply for this one, please put “Response to job posting – User Experience Designer – Impactiviti” in the subject line.

Here’s a link to the Impactiviti Job Board – your first stop for life sciences job searching!

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