Pharmaceutical care services marketing

McDonough RP, Pithan ES, Doucette WR, Brownlee MJ. 1998b. Marketing pharmaceutical care services. J Am Pharm Assoc 38 667. 

A common marketing axiom states that consumers need to be exposed to something new, on average, seven different times before a decision is made to engage in fhaf new experience or service or to buy fhe new producf. This also applies to fhe practice of pharmaceutical care. Another marketing statement is that if people like a new service, fhey fell fhree other people about their experience. 

There is a long-standing habit in the health economics literature of supporting the need to regulate health care services in market failures such as information asymmetries, complexity and uncertainty, indivisibilities and externalities. These imperfections are also present in the market of a resource that is very important in the health service production process pharmaceutical products. However, the pharmaceutical market also presents certain specific characteristics that are of particular importance and have been used as arguments in favour of the need to adopt public policies of price intervention and regulation. 

The cost of prescriptions has risen dramatically in the last several decades. The average price for a single prescription in the USA in 2003 was more than 50.00. This rise is occasioned by new technology, marketing costs, and stockholder expectations. The pharmaceutical industry typically posts double-digit profits annually while the retail business sector shows a 3% profit. The cost to the patient for many new drugs like "statins" exceeds 1000 per year. Pharmaceuticals are the highest out-of-pocket health-related cost for the health sector because many other health care services are covered by health insurance whereas prescriptions are often not. 

As pharmacy continues to evolve, marketings role grows in importance. Since articulation of the concept of pharmaceutical care (Hepler and Strand, 1990), many innovative pharmacy services have been described and implemented, ranging from... 

Product refers to an organization s offering. It is not limited to tangible goods but, as described earlier, can be any item of value or combination thereof. Thus, to marketers, the term product has a very broad meaning. In the delivery of pharmaceutical care, the product most often provided is a service. The next section will explore some fundamental differences between phys-... 

Price discrimination refers to the practice of selling identical products to different sets of customers at different prices. Expressed another way, different customers pay different markups over the identical incremental cost of producing an identical product. Price discrimination is widely practiced in the hotel and airline industries, by universities in the United States that can vary their tuition through scholarships, by electric power companies, and in the health care industry. Hospitals in the United States, for example, routinely charge different payers different prices for the same services. In the U.S. pharmaceutical market, different prices are charged to different insurance carriers and to self-paying patients. Worldwide, the same pharmaceutical firms sell the identical product to different countries at different prices. 

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