PhRMA Voluntary Code on Marketing Practices
PhRMA Voluntary Code on Marketing Practices
These points summarize the Pharmaceutical Research and Marketing Association (PhRMA) voluntary code on interactions with health care professionals. The full document is available on the association’s web site at www.phrma.org.
- General Interaction: Interaction should focus on informing the health care professional about scientific and educational information and supporting scientific medical research and education to maximize patient benefits.
- Entertainment: Interaction should not include entertainment. Interaction should occur at a venue conducive to providing scientific or educational information. Specifically, this means no dine and dash, no entertainment, and no recreational events (for example, sporting events or spa visits).
- Continuing Education: Companies can provide support to the conference sponsor but should not fund individual participants. That means, a company should not pay an individual’s tuition, but could provide support to the event sponsor. That sponsor may in turn provide grants to individuals to participate or to reduce the overall registration fees for all attendees.
- Consultants: Legitimate consulting or advisory arrangements are appropriate but token consulting arrangements should not be used to justify payments to health care professionals. Characteristics of legitimate consulting arrangements include the retention of professionals based on their expertise, not as a reward or inducement for prescribing, and retaining no more consultants than needed for the specific program. For example, it would be inappropriate to retain 10,000 physicians for a program that requires no more than 1,000, or to select them as a reward for high prescribing.
- Educational and Health Care Practice-Related Items: Educational and practice-related items may be provided to health care professionals, but should be for the health care benefit of patients and of less than substantial value ($100 or less). Items for the personal benefit of the health care professional should not be offered or distributed. In short, nothing should be offered or provided that would interfere with the independence of the health care professional’s prescribing practices.
Source: Pharmaceutical Research and Marketing Association, Washington, DC.
These points summarize the Pharmaceutical Research and Marketing Association (PhRMA) voluntary code on interactions with health care professionals. The full document is available on the associations web site at www.phrma.org.Subscribe Now for Access
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