GSK to change sales, won't pay doctors to attend conferences

Officials at GlaxoSmithKline in England said the company will no longer tie bonuses to sales targets and will phase out paying doctors to speak at conferences. In a statement, the drug manufacturer said it is changing its global sales and marketing practices and will roll out a new sales force compensation program, removing individual sales targets and begin the process to end direct payments to healthcare professionals for speaking engagements or attendance at medical conferences by the start of 2016. "We believe that it is imperative that we continue to actively challenge our business model at every level to ensure we are responding to the needs of patients and meeting the wider expectations of society. Over the past five years, this has seen us take significant steps to increase access to medicines in developing countries and to be more transparent with our clinical trial data," Andrew Witty, chief executive officer of GSK, said in a statement. "We've also made changes to how we work with healthcare professionals. Building on this, today we are outlining a further set of measures to modernize our relationship with healthcare professionals. These are designed to bring greater clarity and confidence that whenever we talk to a doctor, nurse or other prescriber, it is patients' interests that always come first." During 2014, the company will implement a new compensation system which will apply to all GSK sales employees who work directly with prescribing healthcare professionals. The company also intends to begin a consultative process towards stopping direct payments to healthcare professionals for speaking engagements and for attendance at medical conferences, GSK said. The new compensation program will have no individual sales targets. Instead, GSK's sales professionals who work directly with prescribing healthcare professionals will be evaluated and rewarded for their technical knowledge, the quality of the service they deliver to support improved patient care and the overall performance of GSK's business. The new compensation system is to be in place in all of the countries GSK operates in by early 2015. GSK will also stop providing financial support directly to individual healthcare professionals to attend medical conferences and instead will fund education for healthcare professionals through unsolicited, independent educational grant routes, the company said.