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December
10,
2010 -- 3:45pm EST
Emails and Ethos: the Senate Stent Report, a
Corporate Culture Wake-up Call?
(The following is a guest commentary
from Deborah Shaw, Director of Education at Angioplasty.Org.)
These
leaked Abbott emails (in the Senate
Finance Committee Report on Cardiac Stents regarding Dr.
Midei in Maryland) reveal that healthcare marketing professionals,
especially those that
aren't
involved directly in patient care, sometimes
forget that this is serious stuff. It's about life and death:
the work they do profoundly affects sick, vulnerable people who
are
afraid they might die, and who could be your dad or your
daughter.
The media response occurs in a climate where there
is, in fact, evidence and concern that American healthcare
is overly interventional and procedure-oriented. Everyone in the
field knows there are some physicians who probably jump into
stenting too quickly in borderline cases. It's a question
of professional opinion and probably not a question of negligence,
but overly aggressive treatment is real.
The outcry from the media, and the Senate's investigation,
is simplistic, inaccurate and misleading, but it demonstrates
a decline in the public
trust. I'd urge industry folks to think of this as a warning sign,
a wake-up call, kind of like finding out your cholesterol is climbing
(and I'm sure
their blood pressure is). It might be time to do some diagnostics
on your company's climate, ethos, tone. Communicating the science
behind medical products that offer genuine improvement in efficacy
and patient outcomes is what ought to be the focus of sales efforts,
not fashioning
the flashiest trade show event, lavishly courting physician-suitors,
or taking a gung-ho "How do we do it? Volume!!" marketing approach.
Doing good things and making money are not oppositional
goals: well-managed companies with good products do make profits.
But the first responsibility,
the mission, for healthcare organizations, is to improve the quality
of patients' lives; after that, and only after that, is the objective
to maximize
sales. That sounds naive and idealistic to some industry professionals
(and it's very hard to get those individuals to invest in substantive
public education because it's not quantifiable, doesn't contribute
to quarterly results). But this might be a good moment for industry
leaders to
check
in on the mission, and make sure your company's focus is on the long-term
business of science in the interest of patients, over the more short-sighted
science of business in the interest of market penetration. In the
long run it's the more profitable approach -- and less likely to
lead to hysterical
Senate investigations.
Staying on, and communicating, that mission
requires visionary corporate leadership, objective analysis of
data, difficult choices
that put prudence, patients and science in the forefront, and vigilance
in keeping the corporate culture on track.
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