Date and Time
January 22, 2003
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM

Availability
Open to the public
No RSVP required

Speaker
Randall S. Stafford - Assistant Professor

Corporate promotion of medications is a key feature of the US health care system, but little published information exists about the composition of promotional effort by promotion mode and medication class. We used nationally representative data on expenditures for the 250 most promoted medications in 1998 to examine estimated expenditures for the five most commonly used modes of promotion. In 1998, $13 billion was spent promoting pharmaceutical products in US, of which 86% was accounted for by the top 250 drugs and 60% by the top 50 drugs. Advertising to consumers was more concentrated on a small subset of medications than was promotion to professionals. Overall, 1998 expenditures were dominated by free samples provided to physicians (equivalent retail cost of $6.6 billion) and office promotion ($3.5 billion) followed by consumer-directed advertising ($1.3 billion), hospital promotion ($705 million) and advertising in medical journals ($540 million).