Hospital Reps “Sell” Doctors on Using Their Services

The actual positions are not called sales and marketing though it’s a branded name called “Physician Liaisons” easier to get in the door with that title.  Tenet is hiring ore of them to go around and speak with doctors and many of the Liaisons are in fact former drug reps as they know the routines in getting past he front desk gate keepers and how to cater lunch.  So who says we don’t have the best healthcare system every sold? 

The actual positions are not called sales and marketing though it’s a branded name called “Physician Liaisons” easier to get in the door with that title.  Tenet is hiring ore of them to go around and speak with doctors and many of the Liaisons are in fact former drug reps as they know the routines in getting past he front desk gate keepers and how to cater lunch.  So who says we don’t have the best healthcare system every sold? 

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My senior mother gets marketed constantly and thus even with using celebrities, it still grows old. I don’t mind the education part of it if they could just spin down the marketing and flawed data a bit.

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So many hospitals are very close on profit levels with large numbers in the US operating in the red.  Some even are making cuts before they get anywhere near the red, like Cedars with mental health, so you know the current economic status is hitting them hard while corporate America keeps putting more in their profits. 

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Practices that are targeted include orthopedics, cardiac care and cancer.  Hospitals need doctors but doctors don’t’ necessarily need the hospitals depending on which field the are in.  The University of Chicago Medical Center is one hospital who is working the program and again they said too that drug reps require less training.  Now we have an interesting word creep in here, “meaningful”…the hospitals want that type of call with the already over loaded doctors..possible…some of course yes but it’s like any other part of sales in you get a lot of “no’s” before you get a “yes”.  The former drug reps according to this article seem to enjoy their new roles, no samples to haul around for one:)  BD 

Sota, 30, is one of four employees the academic medical center has hired in recent months to make “sales calls” on physicians in the hope that they will send more patients to the hospital. “We are trying to build meaningful relationships,” said Sota, who was previously a saleswoman for a small medical device company.

The University of Chicago Medical Center is one of a growing number of hospitals nationwide hiring former drug and device sales reps to visit doctors’ offices to persuade them to use their services over competing facilities.

Rather than handing out samples of prescription drugs, the sales reps call on doctors armed with the latest information on how their facility is reducing hospital-acquired infections and improving patient-satisfaction scores.

While hospitals have always tried to woo doctors to refer patients to them, the institutions are growing more direct in their efforts. The hospitals mine data to see which doctors have the most profitable, well-insured patients, and then they assign those doctors to a sales rep.

As a result of major cutbacks by pharmaceutical and medical-device companies in the past decade, hospitals have thousands of former medical salespeople to draw from. Tenet’s roster of sales associates includes alumni of pharmaceutical and device giants Sanofi-Aventis, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson and Novartis.