Drug firms score by paying doctors for time

A startup company is assembling a network of physicians willing to be paid to listen to sales pitches from pharmaceutical salespeople.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. May 6, 2002.

When a company that brokers meetings between drug detailers and doctors asked him to set aside some time on his schedule to listen to sales pitches from pharmaceutical sales representatives for a fee, Neal Moser, MD, agreed.

He was so busy in the office that he often didn't have time to talk to the approximately 10 sales representatives a day who would drop by unannounced, trying to grab his attention to tout their drugs. They would buttonhole him on his way to see patients, and the conversations were so brief that he did not learn anything about the drugs the salespeople were pitching, said Dr. Moser, a pulmonary and critical care physician with a 13-doctor group in Edgewood, Ky.

"We weren't getting any information, and they weren't giving their message to us, and it was slowing our practice down," Dr. Moser said.

So Dr. Moser signed up to serve as a consultant to Time-Concepts LLC, located in Crestview, Ky., near Cincinnati, because it lets him control when and how he talks to sales reps and gives him a more efficient way to obtain the clinical drug information he needs, he said. And, he gets paid $50 to set aside 10 minutes with a rep.

Aware that the number of pharmaceutical sales reps has more than doubled over the past five years and that doctors don't have time to see them -- and vice versa -- Time-Concepts has launched a service that it says meets the needs of each group.

Physicians can use Time-Concepts' consultation service to receive the information they need and make themselves and their staff work more efficiently, while sales reps can use it to gain access to doctors that they could not reach before, said Patrick T. Burns, MD, the company's co-founder and a family physician with a 70-doctor primary care practice in Covington, Ky. [...]