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PHARMA: Pfizer fires Rost

Pfizer fired its troublesome VP Peter Rost, the one who’s been criticizing them for opposing drug re-importation.  It looks like they suckered him — he tried to start a whistleblower suit for the way that Pharmacia had been marketing a drug. “Pharmacia offered doctors illegal inducements to use genotropin, its growth hormone, as an anti-aging drug for adults”. He obviously thought that Pfizer (which bought Pharmacia in the middle of all this) was covering it up, but they’ve convinced the DOJ that they had brought it to the FDA’s attention before Rost did. So now that the government has pulled out of supporting his suit, Pfizer can call him a wrecker. So they’ve booted him.

Which leaves one issue behind. Given that his position involved being paid $600,000 a year to basically do nothing, how do I apply for the job?


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HOSPITALS/POLICY/TECHNOLOGY: More on the dodgy practices of the GPOs

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Via Health Care Renewal, a great article on the ongoing scandals of the GPOs in the Fort Worth Weekly. It’s long but well worth a read.

Essentially the GPOs, on behalf of the hospitals, agree to pretty much exclusive contracts with big suppliers (BD, formerly known as Becton Dickinson, is singled out in the article) and lock out competitors from the hospital markets they control. The hospitals pay over the odds for their supplies, and then bill that back to their clients (who include lots of government agencies). So we all pay. Meanwhile the GPOs get administrative “fees” from the suppliers, which they in turn pass some of back to the hospitals. And it’s a fair bet that very little of that is reimbursed back to the end payer. Does this remind you of any other part of the health care business?

It does to the Congress which has been investigating GPOs for a while now with precious little result. Luckily the current Administration seems not to mind dubious business practices from monopoly sellers, well not if the company has close connections with certain politicians.  Whether the local authorities or the civil courts will be so kind seems less likely given the records of judgments in the article.

Meanwhile, while BD is being bashed it is also being accused by an ex-employee of stiffing the US government by refusing to sell it needed needles, when it has huge stockpiles in Europe. Apparently BD was also illegally trading with Iraq—something that other well connected companies seem to do with impunity.

A doctor twice promoted by medical device maker BD alleges he was illegally fired after repeatedly complaining about serious company breaches in safety, quality control and ethics, including deliberately keeping off the market syringes that could have stretched the supply of flu shots during the 2004 vaccine shortage. In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, Dr. Zeil Rosenberg also alleges that BD, formerly known as Becton Dickinson, refused to upgrade its shoddy clinical studies quality control system, illegally copied a syringe made by another company, and twice tried to ship syringes to Iraq in 2001 without government authorization. Rosenberg’s objections to the Iraq shipments halted them until proper approval was obtained, the lawsuit states.

TECH: M&A in the Healthcare IT world reviewed

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For those of you that want a recap on 2005’s market action in health care IT so far, it’s worth reading equity analyst Ben Rooks on M&A in the HealthCare Informatics top 100. Essentially there’s a lot of M&A going on compared to recent years, mostly because of the realization that the big boys are going to play in health care IT as the gap between medical imaging and clinical software continues to shrink. Go over and read it for more details.

However, Ben is too kind to note that the " Top 100" (PDF) has been wrong as often as it’s been right in the past few years. For example it still doesn’t rank Siemens as a top 100 health care IT company, even though SMS was consistently over $1 billion in sales when it was acquired in 2000. The acquisition may not have gone well, but it didn’t go that badly! And in the list GE’s total health care IT revenue mysteriously dropped dramatically this year, as they noticed that they’d been counting a lot of medical imaging revenue in the “IT” category, and it went from being number 1 to being number 12. However, it looks like they’ve got the same problem this year with Philips, which certainly isn’t as big an IT player as it is an imaging and monitoring player. And how come Dell is on the list at number 11, but IBM isn’t there at all?

Basically the list has no consistency as to who’s selling hardware versus software versus imaging versus PACS versus IT. But that’s OK, if you want to find out what’s really going on behind the data clutter, you just need to ask me nicely….(although sadly unlike Healthcare Informatics I ain’t giving it away!)

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BLOGS: Disappearing & Reappearing posts

If you’ve been on THCB and seen a post that looks weird or unfinished, and then later noticed that it’s gone away, let me tell you what’s happening. Because Typepad got pretty unreliable I started using a client-side blog editor called BlogJet (made in Russia so it happens). I’m still in the trial period but it’s pretty sweet and it’s the only WISYWIG editor out there (for the PC world at least).  But there is one bug and that’s the one that’s showing up. When I tell it to “post as draft” a piece I’ve just started (usually by using the “BlogJet this” capture tool which grabs the URL) it’s been posting it as a published piece visible to y’all instead.

I then have to go into Typepad to “un-publish” it/ It’s then back in my draft queue and I can then use Blogjet (or Typepad) to rewrite it, and usually I then have it publish it at a later time — that’s a very nice feature given that I try to publish in the middle of the night and don’t want to be up all night hitting the “publish” button.

As it turns out this is NOT BlogJet’s fault, but another teething trouble thing with Typepad.  I know that as they told me as much and are trying to fix it. Hopefully they will soon, as that “post as draft” feature from BlogJet feature even works with the blighted Blogger, and given that BlogJet does almost everything Typepad does other than host, it almost makes me want to return to Blogger. But I think Google’s doing well enough without more help from me!  And TypePad has been so nice to this point I hope that they a) fix the problem and b) give their clients a free client-side editor.  Perhaps they could just cut the BlogJet guy a big check?

PHARMA: Cheerleaders and sex-symbols

Talk about slightly unfortunate timing.  Just one day after the New York Times has an article about how pharma companies go about recruiting cheerleaders as detail babes reps, Bayer announces that it’s hiring the ex-Ms Mick Jagger, and very leggy supermodel, Jerry Hall as a "Global Ambassador for its Erectile Dysfunction Campaign".  In case you’re a little innocent about cheerleaders’ place in American culture, guess what a Google search for "Cheerleaders turns up. (Don’t hit the "I’m feeling lucky" button if you’re at work!).

Jerry is of course well known for recounting that "my mother told me that men want a cook in the kitchen, a maid in the house and a whore in the bedroom. I told her that I’d take care of the bedroom part and hire the other two".

Somehow one gets the impression that the grown-ups have left Beavis and Butthead in charge down in the marketing department, which wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t for that teeny bit of criticism that pharma companies have been facing over their DTC and physician-based marketing activities.

BLOGS: Grand Rounds

Graham does a nice job on Grand Rounds. I could have sworn I sent in my entry earlier last week, but a check of my “sent emails” just goes to prove that these days my mind files the “thinks I honestly intended to do” and the “things I did” in the same mental file. Still lots of good stuff there without interference from me.

Some people have noticed that despite being the WSJ’s “must read” health care blog, THCB hasn’t hosted Grand Rounds yet. Look for this to be rectified at some point soon!

 

TECH: New health care IT blog nexus!

Just in case you don’t think that THCB is enough, Shahid Shah who among other things runs The Healthcare IT Guy blog, has put together a page with many if not all of the health care IT related blogs on it at HITSphere. There are a couple there that I haven’t picked up on including a news source about consumer health informatics and one from Microsoft. Although Shahid has also put up the IBM one yet, showing commendable corporate even handedness! Note the lack of blogs from health care specialists Cerner, Epic, et al–perhaps they just don’t dare go into Mr HISTalk’s territory. I’m trying to figure out how to get my feed to send itself there when I talk about technology…which the casual THCB reader knows that I do from time to time.

Meanwhile, check out the new HITSphere index and wander around. I suspect in a year this page will be an interesting historical artifact, and we’ll need new tools to sort all the new different blogs and postings out there.

TECH: iPods and Health Care

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The ever wonderful Jane Sarasohn Kahn has a new commentary up at iHealthbeat on  iPods and Health Care. It’s really more about how consumers are using new media in general in health care rather than podcasting per se, but it’s well worth a read.

 

TECH: More PHR struggles

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I’m talking at a conference at the end of the week about consumer health records.  Given that you all by now know the history of how the company I was with that sold consumer health records to health plans was ahead of its time didn’t survive, you won’t be surprised to know that I’ll be talking on a topic I’m calling  An Archaeology of the Commercial PHR Movement.

Well today it looks like another start-up that announced with much fanfare a couple of years back is biting the dust, or at least going back to the machine shop for some serious work. RedMedic is sending out letters asking its subscribers to print out their records, and telling them to go to MedicAlert instead. Unfortunately when they contacted me a couple of years back, I told them that I thought they’d have a very tough road. Hopefully, they’ll come out of this somehow, but unfortunately they look like they’ll be another layer in the rubble on which hopefully a viable PHR will be built.