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Online services offer to help doctors schedule drug reps

Companies offer an online forum for doctors and drug sales reps to schedule detailing visits, but is this something doctors want?

By Tyler Chin, amednews staff. June 16, 2003.

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Two start-ups are rolling out a Web-based service that would enable doctors and sales representatives to schedule office visits.

MedMeeting Inc., Boston, and Rep/PASS Co., Westerville, Ohio, said their services will make it a lot easier for physicians to cope with the numerous sales reps clogging their offices, waiting to buttonhole them.

The service "basically makes life a lot easier for the nurses, office managers and the physicians who want to see the reps but want [the process] to be much more organized," said Briscoe Rodgers, MedMeeting's CEO. "It also makes life a lot better for the reps who won't have to wait four hours to see the physician. ... Instead, they can zip in and zip out."

Eric Prack, MD, a family physician at a six-doctor family medicine group practice in Willard, Ohio, isn't crazy about having 20 sales reps show up unannounced at his office on a weekly basis. But he thinks scheduled visits would be more time-consuming.

"The way we do it now is OK," Dr. Prack said. "My work station is right across from where all the samples are stored, so they just kind of hang out there. If I have a few minutes, I say hello and sign for their stuff. But I'm usually pretty busy so I don't have a lot of time to talk to them."

So far, MedMeeting said it has one large group practice in Massachusetts signed up for the service, which it expects to roll out by the end of July.

Rep/PASS said several group practices and pharmaceutical reps have used its service since last December, but declined to identify them because "we're not even aggressively marketing it yet," said president and founder Joel Flora.