Overview
Although each provider category maintains its own specialties and each therapeutic area has its own key drivers that affect thought leaders’ compensation structures, Cutting Edge Information’s analysts looked at overall costs for opinion leader payments by company size. Also, because minimum and maximum hourly rates are listed, the data intuitively take into account specialty and expertise, as those with either of the former, will receive nearer the maximum than those without.

In general, large or larger mid-sized pharmaceutical companies attract thought leaders by offering high-profile, exciting and groundbreaking research opportunities rather than by just offering honoraria, therefore paying less on the average than small companies. As Figure 1.1, shows small companies pay the highest minimum and maximum hourly rate for a thought leader at $XXX and $XXX an hour. Mid-sized companies on average pay a higher minimum than large companies, at $XXX versus $XXX an hour but, according to survey data, pay almost $XXX less at the maximum. Yet, when looking at the median of both data sets, both company sizes pay a maximum rate of $XXX an hour. Third-party companies pay the least overall, with a range of $XXX to $XXX an hour. Consistently throughout the report, the data show that third-party companies pay less hourly and for fees because often they provide the service of finding physicians consulting activities instead of the physicians contacting the companies themselves.

Excerpted from Chapter 2, Section 1: Managing Thought Leaders in the Current Compliance Environment

Compliance Groups
The drastic increase in federal and state regulation concerning companies’ interactions with physicians also implies and precipitates an increase in legal oversight of each relationship recruited, established and maintained. From the time of the OIG’s publication, legal’s presence has continually infused the process to retain thought leaders. Some companies, such as Companies 1 and 19, involve their legal teams for almost every contract or thought leader engagement, to ensure that they are staying with compliance standards. At Company 23, those dealing with thought leaders must prepare a slide set for legal representatives to review before encountering a thought leader and sharing the slides with him.

This oversight phenomenon has slowed the bureaucratic process to hire thought leaders, creating the need not only for dedicated thought leader management teams, but for a liaison between legal and these teams. While legal has other concerns than contracting thought leaders, thought leader management teams have duties suffering from the inordinate amount of time spent communicating with legal teams and fighting through the dense legal writing that today’s compliance environment effects.

Subsequent to the OIG’s publication of its guidelines for the pharmaceutical industry, many companies began to shift their thought leader development groups away from commercial organizations and into their medical affairs functions. This shift represented a major trend between 2003 and 2007. Although not every company has shifted its thought leader management groups’ reporting lines, many that have are now going one step further by creating dedicated compliance organizations.

(more sample practices can be found by downloading the Free Report Summary)