Current Healthcare Industry Practice - Term Paper Example

How to develop and maintain effective relationships between physicians and pharmaceutical companies have long been an issue of the principal public concern. For a long time, visiting physicians and informing them about new products and medical devices had been a conventional practice within the healthcare industry, leading to numerous conflicts of interests which, in their turn, bore significant consequences on the quality of medical care. Future leaders must be (a) aware of the conflicts of interests, to which the discussed healthcare industry practices lead, and (b) promote collaboration and cooperation between physicians and pharmaceutical manufacturers, in order to encourage and sustain the atmosphere of progress and innovation in healthcare.

Commercialization has already become the definitive feature of development and evolution in health care, producing multiple heavy impacts on the quality and efficiency of practices within the healthcare industry. The relationships between pharmaceutical companies and physicians have long been an issue of key public concern. “Traditionally, marketing by pharmaceutical and device companies has centered on company representatives or ‘detail persons’ who visit individual physicians and provide information on new products” (Brennan et al, 2006, p.433). Simply put, maintaining contact with and meeting pharmaceutical company representatives was a traditional healthcare industry practice among physicians and healthcare leaders. The past years witnessed a rapid increase in the scope and scale of this practice, with almost 90% of the pharmaceutical industry allocated directly among physicians (Brennan et al, 2006).

Needless to say, the purpose of the discussed contacts between physicians and pharmaceutical companies was to promote drugs and medical devices in the healthcare industry. Moreover, payments, gifts, rewards in the form of scholarships, free-of-charge meetings and conferences, paid tickets for traveling to conferences and meetings and research project grants were inevitable components of the discussed practice (Brennan et al, 2006).

The practice always carried significant implications for physicians and healthcare leaders, leading to numerous conflicts of interest in the healthcare industry. Such conflicts of interest emerge, whenever physicians operate motives and reasons that compromise their moral and ethical professional obligations (Brennan et al, 2006). In other words, conflicts of interests mean that physicians’ judgments and decisions regarding patients’ wellbeing can be inappropriately affected by secondary interests (Studdert et al, 2004). In the context of physicians-pharmaceutical company relationship/ practice, financial gains and material rewards can tempt physicians to deviate from their moral, ethical, and professional obligations (Brennan et al, 2006).

Recent changes in the healthcare legislation obligate pharmaceutical companies to disclose the number of rewards to physicians, either in direct payments or gifts. The philosophy behind the new is that patients and the public must know how many pharmaceutical companies pay to physicians and whether the use of medical preparations and prescriptions in the healthcare industry is based on the considerations about patients’ health (Anonymous, 2010). To a large extent, the new law must lead to better accountability in the healthcare industry and practices in the country. The United States remembers the Lupron Case, when Abbot Laboratories and Takeda Chemical Industries encouraged physicians, namely, urologists, “to bill Medicare at the average wholesale price for Lupron, when they received free or at discounted prices” (Studdert et al, 2004). Today, the new law and changes in conventional healthcare industry practices carry far-reaching implications for healthcare leaders.

Healthcare leaders must familiarize themselves and their followers, including physicians and partners from pharmaceutical companies, with the changes in healthcare legislation. Rather, it is high time healthcare leaders realized the innovative, patient-oriented potential of collaboration between physicians and pharmaceutical companies. It is imperative that physicians and pharmaceutical companies do not simply disclose their financial compensations and gifts but use their relations, to develop innovative approaches to medicine and serve the needs of patients. For this purpose, physicians must have sufficient knowledge of ethical issues in the healthcare industry and ways to resolve these ethical dilemmas. It is within leaders’ scope of obligations, to teach physicians how and when to remove themselves from care if it compromises their moral and ethical responsibilities to patients.