The Clinical Side: Turn up the science

Whether you are a specialty representative in a primary care field or you're in a niche specialty pharmaceutical field, you are probably focusing your time on the specialists in your area. Specialists are protocol-driven physicians; they are usually at the cutting edge of their therapeutic area and treat "niche" patient populations or rare diseases. At the specialist level, medicine has become as much an art as a science. Dr. Clarence Foster, the director of kidney and pancreas transplant surgery at the University of California in Irvine, is a surgeon who is interested in knowing "who is raising the bar in transplant." For Foster, this may mean steroid-sparing procedures or working with living donors or with kidneys from 60-year-old donors -- in other words, highly experimental approaches to treating a disease.

I asked Foster what he expects from his interactions with specialty representatives. "Product knowledge is the bare minimum," he says. The representative should know how the product is being used by specialists and "who's doing what in town." Because specialists often work with rare cases and challenging procedures, networking with their colleagues is especially important. Representatives have a unique opportunity to interact with other specialists and learn how the specialists are using their products as well as who the principal investigators are for novel treatment approaches with the products. This translates to information the representative may provide to specialists when they ask about current and novel applications of the product.

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