CMR Institute | Education for Pharmaceutical Representatives, Biotech, & Medical Device Industries

The Value of Pharmaceuticals

This course describes the value of pharmaceuticals in today’s healthcare environment. The course discusses how the use of new medications often saves and extends patients' lives, improves quality of life, and reduces overall healthcare costs. The course also describes the many factors that contribute to establishing a price for a prescription drug. In addition, it discusses the effects of patents, generic drugs, and over-the-counter drugs n drug prices over time. Furthermore, the course describes issues of prescription drug accessibility and coverage, and explores proposals for making prescription medications available to greater numbers of consumers at a reasonable cost. Finally, it describes what pharmaceutical companies can do to help ensure that the value of their drugs is realized and how they can communicate this value to their customers.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this course, the student will be able to describe how advances and innovations in medications have helped to save, extend, and improve patient’s lives; describe how pharmacoeconomic outcomes can demonstrate the value of pharmaceuticals; identify the factors that determine prescription drug pricing; describe how patents, generic drugs, and over-the-counter drugs affect sales of pharmaceutical products; describe the issues of prescription drug accessibility, providing and expanding insurance coverage of drugs, and other proposals for lowering pharmaceutical costs; describe the role of the pharmaceutical industry in achieving and demonstrating the value of prescription drugs.

Who Should Take This Course

Sales representatives, managers, directors, pharmaceutical executives, and others who frequently need to answer questions and provide information to healthcare professionals regarding the value of pharmaceuticals and the rationale for prescription drug pricing practices.

Career Applications/Benefits

Although prescription drugs are necessary components of medical care, the cost of prescription drugs has become a major focus of the debate around escalating medical expenses in the United States. However, a clear argument can be made that prescription drug use typically is less costly than treating complications or exacerbations of many chronic diseases. One often-neglected topic in the discussion of pharmaceutical pricing is the value of prescription drugs. The information in this course will help individuals working in the pharmaceutical industry to achieve, communicate, and demonstrate the value of pharmaceutical products. As key spokespeople of the pharmaceutical industry, sales representatives can point with pride to the use of prescription drugs in prolonging lives and improving quality of life for many patients. With the knowledge obtained from this course, representatives and others working in the pharmaceutical industry can also assure prescribers that the use of pharmaceutical products is actually one of the most cost-efficient measures in modern healthcare.