The question contains two implications, neither of which I agree with. That ONLY spending at the “point-of-care”, i.e. in the doctor’s office, reaches patients and that spending money like CPG brands doesn’t. News to me! I thought you could effectively reach patients in lots of ways.

“Point-of-care” encompasses a lot of different of types of media both in the waiting and exam rooms – wallboards, in-office TV, patient tear sheets, magazine cover-wraps, electronic/interactive kiosks, exam table paper, and probably more. We polled 11 providers of point-of-care programs and found that four said business was up, four said that it was flat, and three reported declines. Our guess is that the overall category is flat.

The lack of growth is not surprising. DTC is down and part of the rationale for point-of-care promotion is to capitalize on the DTC program when the patient is in the office. Point-of-care programs, especially in-office TV and wallboards, look expensive from the client’s point of view and often require working with multiple vendors to get good coverage. And budgets for many media are flat to declining.

But there is growing evidence for the effectiveness of point-of-care promotion. An SDI Health and IMS Health study reported a 9% increase in new prescriptions in office with wall boards over a control group without boards. A 2009 Arbitron study reported a 25% aided recall of ads running on office TVs. A Wolters Kluwer Health study reported a 5.8-to-1 ROI for a program of patient brochure racks, and a consumer magazine cover-wrap program we did for one of our brands generated a 20-to-1 ROI.

Marketers of Rx products need to educate patients – not just because PhRMA says they should, but because it makes, and has always made, good business sense to do so, especially if you are the share leader. And the job of every marketer is to reach patients with accurate, memorable, distinctive messages, whether they are messages about a specific brand or about a disease, in the most efficient way they can.

For some categories, reaching patients at the “point-of-care” will make sense as part of a well-thought-out media plan. But reaching them by TV, radio, the Internet, social media, direct mail, billboards, and event sponsorship may make sense too. It all depends on how many patients there are, how they can be most effectively targeted, how attentive they are to various media, the nature of the disease, patient’s willingness to discuss it with their doctors, and many more factors.