Pharma Forums Have Special Needs, Too

(MoneyWatch)  Short of planting a mole, there are few better ways to look into an industry's id than by reading its trade press. And according to those who track pharma most closely -- at times almost sycophantically -- one of the industry's major preoccupations these days is... meetings.

Not just any meetings, though. Apparently drug-company get-togethers -- which can range from sales training and "fire-up" gatherings to strategy planning sessions to clinical-trial review meetings --have no shortage of special needs, which of course requires special treatment by resorts and their support staffs. Two recent articles in Pharmaceutical Executive describe the emergence of conference staffs who pride themselves on being "pharma fluent" and how Puerto Rico has emerged as a major destination for pharma forums.

"Pharma fluency," as defined here, includes:

• Extensive training of everyone from managers to caterers on such matters as "the difference between an internal and external meeting, the history of the pharmaceutical industry, the structure and divisions of pharmaceutical companies, the unique terms and vocabulary of the industry, the trends in meeting consolidation, and the differences between pharmaceutical companies and other healthcare and biotech companies"
• Knowledge of the regulations that affect pharma companies, the most important being -- get this -- "the PhRMA Code of Interactions with Healthcare Professionals"
• Understanding drugmakers' almost paranoid need for secrecy, which includes providing locking conference rooms, stocking them with shredders for on-the-spot document destruction, and returning any "materials" inadvertently left behind to the meeting sponsor
• Awareness of when resorts can bill the expenses of doctors to a pharma sponsor, and when they have to be billed separately (sorry, sports fans, the articles don't go into much more detail than that)

Puerto Rico, meanwhile, is apparently a hot drugmaker destination these days not because it's a lush tropical paradise, but because it's a global pharmaceutical manufacturing hub with pharma-savvy conference resorts to match. Or, as PharmExec puts it:

It's an island where 16 of the 20 top-selling pharmaceuticals are manufactured; where $30 billion worth of pharmaceutical products are shipped globally each year; where in four years more than $4 billion has been invested in biotechnology by such companies as Abbott, Lilly, and Amgen; where a $3 billion Knowledge Corridor, a flagship project that includes the new Puerto Rican Cancer Center, is in development.

So the weather, the beaches and a profusion of luxury resorts have nothing to do with it. Good to know.

It's impossible to know how seriously to take any of this stuff, of course. But it's hard to read these pieces without wondering what the industry would look like if it devoted half as much effort to producing novel medicines and ensuring they're sold only to people who need them as it seems to spend ensuring there's plenty of hand-holding available whenever its officials get together -- strictly for business, of course.

Photo by Flickr user Mannequin-, CC 2.0