This One’s for Free, Kid
Doctors and drug companies are always looking for ways to get their patients to keep taking their prescription medicines over time. One company has come up with a novel approach: Give the medicine away free, at least in the beginning.
This could well top efforts by pharmaceutical companies that use direct mail premiums like free video rentals and free phone cards to promote continued use of medicines.
Access Worldwide, an Arlington, VA-based provider of medical-related database marketing services, has started FirstRx, a program that allows pharmaceutical houses, drugstores and doctors to monitor mail order medicine sales, refills, compliance and efficacy.
Access was planning at deadline to promote FirstRx early this month to 30,000 general medical practitioners nationwide. Doctors’ names come from the American Medical Association.
Access is one of nine AMA franchise companies entitled to use the AMA list, says Doug Rebak, president of Access Phoenix Marketing Group, the division in charge of the campaign. The company may target specialist physicians as time goes on.
The firm will start out with a force of pharmaceutical salespeople and follow those efforts with direct mail and telemarketing. No further direct response efforts are planned at the moment.
The program works by having doctors fill out and submit a customized patient prescription form directly to Access. The company then uses proprietary technology to scan the form and produce lists, labels and manifests to deliver the prescription directly to the patient, says Rebak.
On those forms, patients are encouraged to voluntarily share such basic data as their name, address and income, says Rebak. He adds that their medical conditions aren’t disclosed, though the name of the medicine is. As an incentive to recruit patients, he says, Access is picking up the tab for the first week of medicine.
Access is looking to make money from its drug company clients, which will pay fees based on cost and amount of medicine prescribed. Rebak expects to pull in substantially more than $1 million a year but declines to further elaborate.
Rebak does admit Access hasn’t test marketed FirstRx yet but claims FirstRx is the only service like it around.
