PhRMA head calls for 'revolution'

The pharmaceutical industry, by pioneering innovative "decisive technologies" to treat disease, offers "breakthroughs" that shatter the negative assumptions stifling customers' confidence in medical progress, according to Sidney Taurel, chairman of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, Washington.

"Traditional approaches to the best health care results at the lowest cost aren't working," Taurel said. "What's more, most new approaches only dramatize stark choices - cost or quality, access or rationing, hope or hopelessness."

Taurel, who is president and chief operating officer of Eli Lilly and Co., spoke at the PhRMA annual meeting in Boca Raton, FL, in March. Taurel said what's needed is breakthrough health care results, or a revolution. "It is our industry mission to use this revolution to move diseases to genuine breakthroughs that not only meet our customers' needs but also fulfill their hopes."

To help the industry tell this "revolution story," Taurel said Lilly has commissioned a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research to determine the economic value of pharmaceuticals in three major disease categories.

Breakthroughs

Taurel said the biotechnology revolution has captured the public imagination. He added that we must help patients, medical professionals, providers, payers and policy makers recognize that "only pharmaceutical companies, conducting responsible research, have the wherewithal to transform all this exciting science into breakthrough health care results. Many of their policy decisions will determine how much and how quickly we can help them solve the fundamental global health care dilemma."

Innovative pharmaceuticals are decisive technologies that not only reduce patients' need for costly health care resources, but also makes people more productive and more independent, Taurel said. "The industry would be able to deliver more decisive technologies more quickly if our customers share our goals and understand how they can help us do the most for them."

In order to deliver decisive, cost-effective treatments, Taurel said the pharmaceutical industry needs:

•Â A regulatory environment whose policies, processes and resources are aligned with the pursuit of breakthrough advances.

•Â Rigorously defined, vigorously enforced intellectual property protection for our inventions.

•Â Free-market policies that establish the prices for products according to their clinical and economic value rather than arbitrary bureaucratic decisions.

•Â Adoption of an integrated care philosophy. PR