What's the latest on the Oncol reorg?

[Anonymous]

I don't think that's the question. Yes, we are all drug reps, we all sell drugs. We all get compensated the same way, the more of our medicines our doctors use the more money we make. That is true whether you are in CV-Met, Immunoscience, Neuroscience or Oncology. And in my view there are no teams better than others. There are of course star performers but on balance I am sure most of the teams have their fair share of great good and not so good. The question is whether it makes sense to do that selling in the exact same way. How many times has an Abilify rep walked into an office where the last two patients on their drug just died, or how many times has a CV-Met rep walked into an office where a patient on your drug suffered from an extreme hypersensitivity reaction right in the office and had to be rushed to the ER. How many of you sell drugs that cost in the range of $100k in a buy and bill model where the office may be out of pocket for very large amounts of money while waiting for reimbursement. For sure Immunoscience has faced some of these financial issues. Some office are sub-cu only because they don't want to deal with buy and bill and some offices love buy and bill because they build a whole business around it. But you have not seen all the safety issues that our offices can face. The only point is that it is just not clear that the same approach is going to work in every area. But I guess we will see. Yervoy missed some targets in first quarter. So I guess we will be giving the Abilify selling model a try.

 

[Anonymous]

I don't think that's the question. Yes, we are all drug reps, we all sell drugs. We all get compensated the same way, the more of our medicines our doctors use the more money we make. That is true whether you are in CV-Met, Immunoscience, Neuroscience or Oncology. And in my view there are no teams better than others. There are of course star performers but on balance I am sure most of the teams have their fair share of great good and not so good. The question is whether it makes sense to do that selling in the exact same way. How many times has an Abilify rep walked into an office where the last two patients on their drug just died, or how many times has a CV-Met rep walked into an office where a patient on your drug suffered from an extreme hypersensitivity reaction right in the office and had to be rushed to the ER. How many of you sell drugs that cost in the range of $100k in a buy and bill model where the office may be out of pocket for very large amounts of money while waiting for reimbursement. For sure Immunoscience has faced some of these financial issues. Some office are sub-cu only because they don't want to deal with buy and bill and some offices love buy and bill because they build a whole business around it. But you have not seen all the safety issues that our offices can face. The only point is that it is just not clear that the same approach is going to work in every area. But I guess we will see. Yervoy missed some targets in first quarter. So I guess we will be giving the Abilify selling model a try.

I sold Glucophage which caused in office diarrhea. That can be explosive and nasty at times. So there!

 

[Anonymous]

The big difference is while cv/met has limited access, oncology has no access without a lunch. You can paint whatever picture you would like but the fact is you rarely speak with physicians.

 

[Anonymous]

....and yet DBM's continue to expect days filled with MD appointments. What a joke! The DBM's contribute absolutely nothing. They should get rid of most of the DBM's, give reps their own territories and get rid of the loser RBD's.

 

[Anonymous]

Well the writing was on the wall the moment Murdo Gordon got the job. He has very quickly built a management team that consists almost entirely of his former Abilify leaders. With the exception of Santosh, his entire team is Abilify. Abilify is a huge success and these are basically smart folks, but I think they are one trick ponies. You can almost guarantee that the field force will be restructured with a small set of TBMs calling on KOLs, Institutions or National Accounts (or something like that) with the rest of the TBMs calling on the community Onc s. And we will be given a few messages and expected to deliver them with robotic precision and frequency, all documented in lots of metrics. It has already started and you can see the rest of it coming. The primary care model is here. And folks like Lynelle Hoch will drive it home with a ferocity that you need to be prepared for. Or you won't be here long.

HOW TRUE!

 

[Anonymous]

I don't think that's the question. Yes, we are all drug reps, we all sell drugs. We all get compensated the same way, the more of our medicines our doctors use the more money we make. That is true whether you are in CV-Met, Immunoscience, Neuroscience or Oncology. And in my view there are no teams better than others. There are of course star performers but on balance I am sure most of the teams have their fair share of great good and not so good. The question is whether it makes sense to do that selling in the exact same way. How many times has an Abilify rep walked into an office where the last two patients on their drug just died, or how many times has a CV-Met rep walked into an office where a patient on your drug suffered from an extreme hypersensitivity reaction right in the office and had to be rushed to the ER. How many of you sell drugs that cost in the range of $100k in a buy and bill model where the office may be out of pocket for very large amounts of money while waiting for reimbursement. For sure Immunoscience has faced some of these financial issues. Some office are sub-cu only because they don't want to deal with buy and bill and some offices love buy and bill because they build a whole business around it. But you have not seen all the safety issues that our offices can face. The only point is that it is just not clear that the same approach is going to work in every area. But I guess we will see. Yervoy missed some targets in first quarter. So I guess we will be giving the Abilify selling model a try.

Well said, and I agree with everything you said except the last statement, "YERVOY missed some targets in the first quarter".
Since MM standard of care was clinical trial, the most accessible place to obtain access was at an institution so referral patterns needed to be altered by the oncologist. This took some time. I believe this is why the utilization was originally in the institutions, a habit needed to be broken. Secondly, those unfortunate patients that were being seen by community oncologist were at an explosive state in their disease process and did not have the luxury of time for YERVOY to work, therefore vem was a better option for some. This is the nature of MM unfortunately, probably one of the most henious cancers.

 

[Anonymous]

Well that sounds like it makes sense. It's just hard to understand how all that wasn't understood by the end of 2011 so it could have been built into the sales targets for 2012. Unfortunately it sounded more like Plainsboro thinks that it was mostly a field sales failure. Either way, it does sound like big changes are coming.