Drug Reps Fear iPad’s Spying; They Should Be Worried About Their Jobs
By Jim Edwards | May 19, 2011
As more drug companies supply their employees with iPads, sales reps are increasingly paranoid about their employers’ ability to spy on them. In fact, though, they should really be worried about whether companies will even need humans to promote pharmaceuticals in the future.
The iPad is driving three trends in pharmaceutical marketing right now:
- A number of companies are buying iPads in bulk for their salesforces even if they don’t have presentation software to run on them.
- More doctors are carrying iPads. Some of them receive them aspart of their medical education at teaching hospitals. They are a natural fit because they let physicians access electronically stored medical records without having to leave the bedside. About 75 percent of doctors own some kind of Apple product, according to one piece of research.
- Sales reps are waking up to the iPad’s tracking abilities. In addition to its ability to constantly record its location, reps are finding that company software also records their activity while the device is switched on.
Pfizer (PFE) believes it will save $500,000 a year by giving new sales reps iPads instead of “several large boxes of textbooks and manuals.” Printed training materials for new reps can cost up to $1,000 per rep , but an iPad can be reused for each new incoming class of employees.
Other companies rolling out iPads to their reps include Stryker(SYK), Medtronic (MDT), Eisai, Novartis (NVS), AstraZeneca(AZN), Sunovion, ProStrakan and Millenium.
Novartis CEO Joe Jimenez believes iPads will prevent reps from making illegal “off-label” pitches for drugs. In a March email to employees he wrote:
"Another benefit of having sales materials on the iPad is that our reps will be more compliant — unlike with paper versions, you can’t alter the electronic materials."
The resistance starts here
Novartis reps are already plotting their resistance to the devices on Cafe Pharma, the drug industry’s anonymous gossip website. There’s a thread on “beating the iPad” here and one on preventing the iPad from tracking you here.(Más)
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