AstraZeneca, Cancer Docs and the 'Big Bucket of Money'

When Mike Zubillaga, AZ's Mid-Atlantic regional sales director/oncology, gave an interview to Oncology Newsletter, he probably was hoping he'd be remembered for the answers he gave about how he doesn't like "theoretical things,"  that he's "not much of a book reader," and that his goal for the year was "2 words: passion and intensity."

Unfortunately, Peter Rost and Ed Silverman got a hold of the Winter 2007 journal and history will record that Zubillaga sees cancer doctors' offices this way:

"There is a big bucket of money sitting in every office. Every time you go in, you reach your hand in the bucket and grab a handful. The more times you are in, the more money goes in your pocket. Every time you make a call, you are looking to make more money."

(See the download below if you want to read it for yourself.)

Now he's being vilified for it. Rightly so -- Big Pharma needs to get out of the 'make your quarterly numbers' business and back into the healthcare business.

Having said that, let me defend Zubillaga just a little bit.

I chatted with a couple of drug reps recently about how their compensation works and both agreed that their employers paid them in a way that was 'insane.' Reps get extra pay two ways: for making NRX's go up and for making as many visits to doctors as possible. Thus, it is possible for a rep to get a decent bonus by visiting many doctors even if those docs didn't write the drug much. (And a rep whose scrips go thru the roof could have their bonus reduced if it emerges that the rep didn't visit that many docs because the drug was selling itself.)

So what Zubillaga is really talking about here is not that cancer docs are a source of ready cash for AZ (although they are); he's talking about how if reps simply do their jobs and visit docs with info about AZ's drugs they are likely to hit their bonuses.

Zubillaga put it in very crude terms, but he didn't say anything that wasn't previously known by everyone in the biz. So he's basically being crucified for being a little bit more honest than everyone else.

Footnote: He also mentions that he tries to teach his kids that if you "give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." Could I suggest that Zubillaga drop his "not much of a book reader" attitude and teach his kids that reading a lot is, in fact, the best advice he can give them. It will make them much more sophisticated when dealing with the media, for instance.

Download az_zubillaga.jpg

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