iF THE SHAREHOLDERS ONLY KNEW WHAT WAS GOING ON IN THE FIELD AT J&J

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Anonymous said:
At COBI we are the best and we are paid handsomely for it. I just LOVE my six figure base!
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I would love to see the overpaid lazy biotech DETAIL PEOPLE at jnj try to hack it for even one day actually SELLING diagnostics or medical supplies in the field. Your job isn't even 10-2 anymore. You don't even leave your house to go out in the field because there's no access and you instead fake your calls and play smoke and mirrors games with your numbers while your manager pretends to look the other way. You communications and marketing majors are all an overpaid joke and its about time the company got rid of you and replaced you all with true medical professionals with respectable degrees in the industry and sales people who actually have REAL sales experience on their resume.
 






Anonymous said:
Doesn't matter if you're middle aged, lazy and unmotivated (which all 40+ reps are), an old fart who is coasting until retirement (too many in this company to count), or a dumb recent college grad with a ba or bs (actually the best bang for the buck since their salary is more than half of the 40+ crew and they are much more attractive to look at than the old geezers and hags in the field).
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I worked 3 years in the field -- with fresh out of college Representatives -- who never worked past 1pm. Age is not a factor when it comes to work ethics.
 






Anonymous said:
I'm retired from jnj with over thirty-plus years of experience in this industry. I've seen this career go from a once honored profession where physicians actually looked forward to seeing a representative from a company in their office. You simply put your card in and were told the doctor would you see in a few minutes. The reason they saw you was that you were professional, trustworthy, knowledgeable, and presented information that was of use to them in making professional decisions regarding patients. Today, they don't need you because you really don't have any information they can't get already, insurance companies dictate what can be prescribed, and you take too much of their time when they could be seeing a patient and getting paid for it. They take your lunch because it's a benefit for their staff. It's a break for them, and the last thing they want to hear is a presentation from your mouth. You have no credibility with the physician because of the training you have been given. Telling a fifty year old physician how to treat a patient, coming from someone in their twenties has no credibility at all. They all know that what you're there for is to get a "signature", and offics are more than glad to get that for you just to get you out of their office so they can treat the patients who really need the doctors attention.

This is sad, but not true. You absolutely provide no value to offices anymore, not even providing samples, because patients expect to get these each time they come for a visit and this has itself created a nightmare. As a patient now sitting in my doctors waiting room and observing the representatives who come to the offices makes me sad to see how this profession has been so cheapened. Your no longer needed or wanted.
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I HAVE DOCTORS WHO CALL ME FOR MY OPINION. I AM STRAIGHTFORWARD AND RESPECTED....
ONE CAN'T GENERALIZE.
FOR EXAMPLE, ENRON TOOK ADVANTAGE OF THE SYSTEM. AND SOME J&J REPS ALSO TAKE ADVANTAGE...
AND SOME REPS DONT.
 












Anonymous said:
I would love to see the overpaid lazy biotech DETAIL PEOPLE at jnj try to hack it for even one day actually SELLING diagnostics or medical supplies in the field. Your job isn't even 10-2 anymore. You don't even leave your house to go out in the field because there's no access and you instead fake your calls and play smoke and mirrors games with your numbers while your manager pretends to look the other way. You communications and marketing majors are all an overpaid joke and its about time the company got rid of you and replaced you all with true medical professionals with respectable degrees in the industry and sales people who actually have REAL sales experience on their resume.
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Hell man, working that kind of gig most of us C-cor reps would probably pull 300k a year! We are the best baby, the BEST!
 






Anonymous said:
Hell man, working that kind of gig most of us C-cor reps would probably pull 300k a year! We are the best baby, the BEST!
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Biotech reps are the biggest joke within the industry. You are allc omplacent, entitled, lazy, old, and don't accomplish anything except bs paperwork. The managers and reps have codependent relationships and have been covering for each other and are never even seen in the field by anyone because they don't go to work anymore. It's all smoke and mirrors number manipulation and jnj has been buying your bs for years. At least the pharma divisons at jnj are more militant and traditional in their work expectations. The pharma reps are willing to prove themselves while the biotech reps complain at anything that's expected of them despite their enormous salaries and commissions. Jnj needs to clean out the biotech rep and manager spots and replace them with the other jnj sales employees who are willing to work for their paycheck. Cobi reps and managers all need to be put out to pasture.
 






Anonymous said:
Biotech reps are the biggest joke within the industry. You are allc omplacent, entitled, lazy, old, and don't accomplish anything except bs paperwork. The managers and reps have codependent relationships and have been covering for each other and are never even seen in the field by anyone because they don't go to work anymore. It's all smoke and mirrors number manipulation and jnj has been buying your bs for years. At least the pharma divisons at jnj are more militant and traditional in their work expectations. The pharma reps are willing to prove themselves while the biotech reps complain at anything that's expected of them despite their enormous salaries and commissions. Jnj needs to clean out the biotech rep and manager spots and replace them with the other jnj sales employees who are willing to work for their paycheck. Cobi reps and managers all need to be put out to pasture.
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kee* posting, loser. In the meantime I'll be getting good face time with my dos, bringing in the vials, and screwing your wife in between. I love my gig here, and if I could I would take your wife on P-club to service me and my old lady. But since I can't do that I'll just keep playing poker with my docs and stopping at your house on the way home. You'll be in your garage or closet office doing expense reports, and I'll be satisfying your kids mother. COBI rocks, baby!
 






Drug Sales Reps’ Jobs
By Jim Edwards | January 20, 2011
Comments .. Placebo Effect
Jim Edwards
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Author Bio.BiographyJim Edwards Jim Edwards, a former managing editor of Adweek, has covered drug marketing at Brandweek for four years, and is a former Knight-Bagehot fellow at Columbia University's business and journalism schools.
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.View more ..Everyone in the pharmaceutical business will be getting a free iPad! OK, that’s a slight exaggeration but not by much: Over the next few weeks, thousands of drug sales reps will receive Apple (AAPL) iPads from their employers loaded with Veeva Systems’ iRep, which displays product presentations and then allows the doctor viewing them to sign the iPad when they’re done. iRep was launched Jan. 11.

AstraZeneca (AZN), Novartis (NVS), Sunovion (formerly Sepracor), ProStrakan, and Millenium are already iRep customers, along with a number of contract sales organizations that provide salesforces to other drug companies. The iPad is spreading into a wide array of sales jobs, including small business, real estate agents, and restaurant sales.

Stick to the script, please

Traditionally, drug pitches are delivered orally by reps who have to rote-learn scripts as they turn flipboards and collect pen-and-paper signatures. Getting the message exactly right was key, because getting it wrong can have major legal consequences. The iPad could make script-learning history. Before sales reps begin rejoicing, however, they may want to consider why management is so keen on the iPad as a selling tool.

Currently, reps detail only one or two priority drugs at a time. iRep allows reps to walk into a doctors’ office with an unlimited number of sales presentations preloaded on the iPad. All a rep has to do is stand there while the doc pokes the iPad and then signs. In theory, an iPad could carry any drug company’s entire portfolio of drug presentations, and instantly email research papers in response to off-label use requests. With an iPad, a rep need not even open her mouth.

Drug reps as bicycle messengers

The rep, in other words, becomes a glorified bicycle messenger who need not have any special expertise in the content they’re delivering. It’s the iPad, not the rep, that becomes the crucial part of the transaction. The medium is the message.

As one rep can deliver a plethora of iRep presentations, drug companies may find they need fewer reps to cover the same amount of ground. That has been the trend among companies recently who have tried a number of innovations to get reduce the number of reps they use, including:

Novo Nordisk (NVO) has replaced some reps’ tasks with a web site.
Pfizer (PFE) has done the same thing.
AstraZenenca (AZN) replaced most of its Nexium sales force with a telemarketing center.
Shionogi & Co. (4507) started hiring “no-experience-necessary” reps at half the going salary rate for reps.
So, reps, enjoy your new iPads while you can. But remember that your employer may one day choose to keep the tablet and lose you.
 






Dollars for Docs

What Drug Companies are Paying Your Doctor
In Minnesota, Drug Company Reports of Payments to Doctors Arrive Riddled With Mistakes
by Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber
ProPublica, Dec. 10, 2010, 9 a.m.
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A version of this story [1] ran Monday in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. This story is not subject to our Creative Commons license and cannot be republished until Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2010.

Long before the rest of the country cared, Minnesota took aim at the pharmaceutical industry.

In 1993 it passed a novel law [2]: If drug companies paid any of the state’s health providers to push their pills, the money had to be publicly reported.

Two decades later, the federal government is poised to follow suit, promising a new era of openness.

But a ProPublica analysis of drug company disclosures in Minnesota provides a cautionary lesson for the new federal plan [3], which will require drug and medical device companies to report all payments to U.S. physicians in 2013: The information submitted may not be accurate.

To vet Minnesota’s reports, ProPublica compared them to its Dollars for Docs [4] database, a compilation of speaking fees and consulting payments to physicians and other health providers nationwide by seven drug companies since 2009.

Cases like that of St. Paul pain specialist Todd Hess turned up.

Minnesota’s website shows that Hess received $364,828 last year from four companies—far more money than any of the state’s other physicians.

But those fees understated what at least one of the companies reported on its own website (and on Dollars for Docs). Eli Lilly and Co. told Minnesota [5] it had paid Hess $67,353 in 2009 to give speeches in favor of its pain pill Cymbalta. The company reported [6] Hess made $74,050 during the same period.

The Minnesota official charged with overseeing the drug company data said he hadn’t known about the discrepancy—and wouldn’t unless someone flagged him. The law requiring the disclosures provided no resources to audit their accuracy, said Cody Wiberg, executive director of the state’s pharmacy board, which collects the information.

Contradictory Reports From Drug Firms

Experts who study physician-industry relationships say the accuracy of this information is important. Based on the disclosures, patients or employers may wrongly believe a physician has greater—or lesser—ties to a drug company.

ProPublica found multiple examples in which drug firms reported either inaccurate or inappropriate payment information to Minnesota.

Pfizer, for example, told the state [7] it paid Dr. Randy Schapiro $1,770 last year. But on the firm’s website [8], it reported spending $43,827 on him in the second half of 2009 alone.

And Wyeth, now a Pfizer subsidiary, reported payments [9] to individual doctors that actually went to their institutions for clinical research. That error landed transplant surgeon Arthur Matas at the top of the payments heap in Minnesota, earning $500,000 in 2009. The money really went to the University of Minnesota, according to Matas.

Minnesota records show Matas personally received just $6,190 in 2009 for consulting for Bristol-Myers Squibb and speaking to the Mexican National Transplant Congress on behalf of Genzyme.

Representatives of Wyeth, Pfizer and Lilly said they were unaware that their reports contradicted one another until contacted by ProPublica.

Wyeth submitted a revised report to Minnesota [10] removing Matas and more than a dozen other physicians from the records because the payments did not go to them personally.

Pfizer has submitted a revised report [11] listing Schapiro’s pay last year as $96,889—more than 50 times what it initially said. A Pfizer spokeswoman said her company found internal problems that led to the inaccurate report.

A Lilly spokesman said his company also would amend its Minnesota report. Some of the discrepancies ProPublica found, like Hess’, are the result of problems with the company’s system for tracking payments, spokesman Scott MacGregor said in an e-mail.

Hess and Schapiro, like other Minnesota physicians interviewed, said they were unaware of the discrepancies—and hadn’t looked at the latest disclosures. They said the media makes a bigger deal about potential conflicts of interest than patients do.

“If it’s cleaned up, then I don’t personally have any problems with people seeing the numbers," said Schapiro, a specialist in multiple sclerosis who is now retired and living in Colorado but who still does speaking and consulting.

Schapiro said the doctors paid by pharmaceutical companies are “leaders in their fields,” and patients should want to see their physician among them. “If their doctor is not on the list,” he said, “maybe they should look for a different doctor.”

Hess, the St. Paul pain physician, said his patients aren’t concerned about his speaking fees. The media is lumping together educational speaking with the excesses of the past, he said, when drug companies showered physicians with gifts and free trips.

“This is a mountain-molehill thing,” he said. “I know the problems of the past. I know what pharma has done to change those. People just can’t get over the past.”

A Pitched Battle To Pass Law

Minnesota’s experiment began in the early 1990s as an answer to complaints to the state attorney general’s consumer division.

Patients were calling, concerned their doctors were steering them to higher-cost medications they couldn’t afford. Physicians were reporting the pressure they were getting from the pharmaceutical companies and “the bonanza” of trips, fancy dinners and other inducements, recalled Matt Entenza, then an assistant attorney general.

Entenza’s office suggested solutions to Minnesota legislators. It was a pitched battle from the start, he said. Entenza said he and a colleague faced a small army of lobbyists for the drug companies, physicians and business organizations. A provision requiring the disclosures was deleted from a health care bill in a Senate committee after it passed the House.

In an “11thhour maneuver on the floor,” then-state Sen. Bill Luther succeeded in getting it added back to the bill as an amendment, said Entenza, now a senior fellow at Minnesota 2020, a public policy think tank in St. Paul.

Luther, who later served in Congress for eight years, said the bill was

“very controversial, and I had to use my political position” to get it passed.

Years later, Luther learned that the drug company reports had been simply filed away. Only after researchers and others pressed to see them were they put on the website of the state’s pharmacy board in 2006.

Wiberg, the board’s executive director, said his agency was an unusual choice as the home of the disclosures. The pharmacy board oversees drugs, pharmacies and pharmacists, not money or physicians, he said.

Today, the state posts reports [12] covering about 900 physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants and veterinarians and includes payments from companies of every size. It does not put them in a searchable database but requires users to click through the individual reports of 80 companies to find their doctors.

ProPublica has combined Minnesota’s 2009 reports into one database [13]

National Law More Expansive

Several other states have followed Minnesota’s lead and required companies to report such payments, but not all make the information public.

Vermont [14] passed a similar law in 2001, but until this year allowed companies to keep the names of speakers and consultants confidential as “trade secrets.” Massachusetts recently published [15] its first list of payments to doctors there.

The federal law, known as the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, is more expansive than Minnesota’s effort in some respects. The act covers both drug companies and medical device manufacturers, while Minnesota's law is limited to pharmaceuticals. It also calls for a searchable database, which will make looking up a doctor easier.

But as in Minnesota, the federal law does not require auditing. It does allow for various fines if a company reports incorrectly or not at all. Inadvertent failures to report can result in penalties of $10,000 for each instance up to $150,000 a year. Intentional failure to report can lead to fines of up to $100,000 and a maximum of $1 million annually.

Unlike in Minnesota, the federal legislation was embraced by some pharmaceutical companies worried about disparate state laws that would have set up different requirements.

Dr. Joseph Ross, an assistant professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine who has studied Minnesota’s disclosure law, said he was surprised to learn of the discrepancies. He said the companies are quickly learning that there’s an intense interest on how much they pay physicians.

"You just hope that going forward they do a better job and take it as seriously as possible,” he said.
 






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