Retail clinics : lets go shopping

We often complain that Reliance is selling all kinds of stuff from Leather, cell phone to Uranium (oh yeah, they are digging up in Australia), now Walgrens, CVS which are pharmacy chains in US are opening up retail clinics. What a marriage of convenience, you run the pharmacy – and you also run the clinic. But, this has been a common practice in India at least for as far as I lived.

All aspiring entrepreneurs take a look at their business model : http://www.takecarehealth.com/about.htm. They have limited services, which means that you can forecast what physician services would be needed at you clinic ahead. They plan to have a referral network of primary care physicians who then get a percentage.

How much do companies make on Outsourced Clinical Trials in India ?

We recently did research how big is the profit margin for Indian CROs or multinational CROs setting up offices in India. It was surprising to see the margins and painful to see how systematic the exploitation was in India.

A british pharmaceutical company pays the following amount in USD (converted to Indian Rupees) by each therapy area to an Indian CRO:

1. Cardiovascular : 5,000 – 7,000 USD/patient (2.8 lakhs Rs)

2. Oncology (failed treatments) : 20-25,000 USD/patient (10 lakhs Rs)

3. Safety trials (phase I) : 3,000-8,000 USD/patient (3.2 lakhs Rs)

Now comes the flip side : India has the luxury of having medical graduates working as CRAs and that too for a meagre 1.5 to 3 lakhs Rs per year. That translates to CROs having to just pay what they get on a single patient per year and have “cost-effective” manpower.

If India ever wishes to be professional and competitive companies have to learn to provide higher pay and development incentives. I am worried that clinical research industry is not learning enough from the IT industry. Come on guys for developing silly web pages people make more than a CRA today – its got to change.