A flea market

If you ever attended a pharmacovigilance conference, you may have thought the same: “What on earth is this? Isn’t pharmacovigilance meant to help protect patients from ineffective or even dangerous medicines, playing a potentially crucial part in society?”

And so, if that’s the case, why do I feel like I’m in the middle of a flea market when I find myself in an exhibition hall surrounded by booths with sales reps offering me free pens, inviting me to various raffles, or even just giving me free booze? Maybe it’s not a flea market after all, but rather a wine festival that may be more appealing and possibly a lot of fun which I’m happy to indulge, before I remember I was supposed to come here for the lectures on patient safety.

And when I do get to those lectures, what do I find?

Mostly a bunch of PV providers presenting their own services, having paid a premium price for the opportunity to disguise a sales pitch as a “lecture”.

Will I actually learn anything here? There may be very few “needle in a haystack” sessions with some value. But, mostly, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

So why did I come? Was I misled by expecting a forum where innovative ideas are exchanged, key problems of an industry are openly discussed, and the future of the field is outlined?

Why do I keep seeing sales reps talk about AI advances in PV where the best their company can offer are misleading claims like “market leader” and maybe that free pen.

Why does no one talk about the futility of many PV requirements, ever inflating costs, or the soul drenching of highly educated pharmacists reduced to entering data in a database? That is to name just a few of the real issues that almost no one talks about. So maybe I did come for the wine.

What is the point of going, then? 

If you’re a PV provider, you are promised many PV decision-makers from the pharma industry that you will have the opportunity to meet and pitch your services to. That may sound like a great business opportunity and if you want a booth or a “lecture”, that’s also possible as long as you’re happy draining your marketing budgets. But it must be worth it, right? 

In the end, you will find yourself most of the time standing by your booth that is identical to every other booth in the room only to look at all your competitors doing the exact same thing, everyone eagerly waiting for a break in sessions so that you can all commit a group metamorphosis into a bee swarm attacking a field of innocent conferencegoers who just want to grab coffee from a stand intentionally placed by the beehive.

15 minutes later, when you’re back to your human form hunched over your laptop in an uncomfortable stand, you may wonder why you paid so much money for the opportunity to answer emails standing by a small table, instead of doing this from the comfort of your home (presumably for no extra charges).

You may also have the tendency to fend off the intrusive realization popping up in your mind, telling you that none of the poor people you just ambushed came here with the slightest intention of buying any PV services, they were mostly paid to come.

But maybe you do find that one great business opportunity and it’s all worth it.

Giving a speech = a different story? 

If you’re a lecturer from “the industry”, in some form, you are quite likely paid by the event organizer to come and speak. And that actually sounds great. Sponsored business trip, offers of free wine and dinners paid for by vendors trying to woo you, plus the opportunity to see colleagues of the past and new connections. If you don’t mind the sales rep attention and the occasional bee attack, it is presumably a fun thing to do.

But don’t expect you’ll see many innovative ideas or important issues being even addressed. Best you can hope for is a group of sales reps regurgitating the same thing all over again, with essentially no way of telling them apart.

In no way is this limited to pharmacovigilance events only and if you walk the massive halls of some of the larger pharma events, you may have a similar feeling: “should I stay, or should I go?”.

A final note  

To conclude, hats off to the companies organizing these events. They have found a nice business model incurring a little bit of cost attracting the speakers whose attendance they then promote to PV providers, charging those very high prices with further “premium” products such as lectures or booths.

They’re also able to pull this off without seemingly much effort in the event itself, making you think this couldn’t have been costly, altogether leaving the organizer a very nice profit.

And while we’re extremely unlikely to ever buy the “premium” products, even I must admit that perhaps the price of attendance itself is not always so high for the opportunity to meet up with multiple existing clients all in one place. We know they’re not there to buy other products as they already have the best solution on the market.

But they should still shop around to be sure of that, as well as do their own networking. So, we may send our own human-bee out to those events every now and then after all.

But we’re doing that with the full awareness of what it is: a flea market.