The mission of the medical liaison position is to contribute to improved outcomes for patients through the timely, responsive dissemination of medical information, by exploring mutual clinical and scientific interests with health care providers, by facilitating professional education, and through growth in understanding the dynamics and unmet needs within therapeutic arenas.To achieve this mission, medical liaisons develop and enhance relationships with key opinion leaders within the health care community. Key opinion leaders are those health care practitioners who are considered experts by their peers within their respective fields for their research, publications, speaking, or influence (1).Key opinion leaders have special needs as customers that cannot be met by sales representatives. The need for in-depth and cutting-edge information about products is foremost because these practitioners are in a position to design
Several safety concerns exist with herbal products including lack of safety data, absence of quality-control requirements for potency and purity, and lenient labeling standards.
Objective
To determine the workload and impact of a drug information (DI) inquiry service by measuring the number of Practitioner Hours Saved (PHS) and the associated monetary value.
Methods
During a 3-month study period, the time required to respond to DI requests was recorded to determine the PHS for all questions. Total PHS by practitioner type was determined and then totaled for all questions. Economic impact was estimated by multiplying PHS by the requesting practitioner's salary.
Results
A total of 308 responses were included in the 3-month study period analysis, which represented 266 PHS. This time-savings represented an estimated economic impact of $10,987, which can be extrapolated to $43,950 for a 1-year period.
Conclusions
PHS can be used to show the estimated value of one service component provided by a DI service to the health care system. It is a good measure of estimated practitioner time-savings provided by use of DI services and can be used to record workload statistics.
In an effort to assess medical liaison trends across the pharmaceutical indusw, a survey of medical liaison managers was previously administered and published. 'Ihe intent of the initial survey was to identifi o v d l approaches used by pharmaceutical companies in defining and managing the medical liaison rde. We conducted this fdlwup survey to focus on areas identified by the initial survey participants as major challenges. The current survey focused on developing and conducfing medical liaison training, as well as demonstmting and communicating the value of medical liaison programs. The survey was sent to appraxirnately 1,275 recipients with instructions requesting that the survey was to be completed only by managers or directors of medical liaison programs. The survey results indicated the fdlowing: There is a broad range of new hire and experienced medical liaison training practices, training of newly hired medical liaison difers fiom that of expetienced medical liaisons, and many innovative practices are used to overcome the challenge of demonstrating the value of a medical liaison.
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