Saturday 1 March 2008

Helping Centocor with its blogging


How, you ask?

By letting readers find all of PharmaGossip's posts about Centocor in one easy to find place.

Stories such as this one:

Centocor - Remicade: Move over Bada-Bing!

Two former sales employees of Centocor, a drug manufacturer, are claiming they were fired for criticizing the company's marketing of Remicade, a potent treatment for rheumatoid arthritis.
Centocor encouraged doctors to use Remicade for "off-label" treatments that weren't OK'd by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and promoted how much money the doctors could make by administering the drug, according to a lawsuit filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis.

FDA regulations generally prohibit such marketing to prevent prescriptions that are unsafe or financially motivated. Similar allegations in 2003 prompted an investigation by the New York attorney general and an internal review by Johnson & Johnson, which is Centocor's parent company.

Melissa Funk, and Heidi Greer, are seeking financial compensation for the loss of their jobs and a court injunction blocking Centocor from improper marketing. They offered one example in their lawsuit: a computer slideshow Centocor used to show doctors how they could profit by billing the federal Medicare system for Remicade.

It made a cash register's "ka-ching" sound as it switched between slides.

The lawsuit is entangled with the ongoing state investigation of the Parker Hughes Clinics in Roseville, which was accused of profiting from inappropriate or questionable treatments to patients with cancer or other diseases. Parker Hughes provided Remicade to patients with rheumatoid arthritis and other immune system diseases until last year, when it closed its immunology clinic amid financial pressures.

According to the Centocor lawsuit, Funk and Greer were fired after executives with the Pennsylvania company questioned the women about their marketing of Remicade to Parker Hughes.

Both were told they were fired for taking a client to a strip club, but the workers claimed in the lawsuit that many of their male co-workers had done the same and remain employed.
Source

You can find the rest of the Centocor gossip here.