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PHYSICIANS FAX NETWORK WILL OFFER DRUG COMPANIES LINK TO 250,000 DOCTORS

Executive Summary

PHYSICIANS FAX NETWORK WILL OFFER DRUG COMPANIES LINK TO 250,000 DOCTORS for facsimile transmission of new product information, FDA announcements, product recalls, industry news and announcements of special events when the service is inaugurated by Steritek Jan. 1. Using the American Medical Association master file and Sprint's SprintFAX fax broadcasting and fax-on-demand services, Moonachie, N.J.-based Steritek will coordinate the transmission of medically oriented information to office-based, patient-care physicians, primarily during off-peak hours. PFN will send messages provided by its users to targeted physicians and allow physicians to select documents from a menu to be transmitted to them. The fax cost for PFN users will be about 250 per page, in addition to a royalty for use of the physicians' fax numbers and the cost of list selection. Direct faxes will be restricted to a maximum of four pages, unless a doctor requests more information, and transmissions will be made overnight unless urgent. All information must be medically related. Steritek plans to market PFN initially to the pharmaceutical industry, but in the future the company expects to offer PFN services to other health care and personal care manufacturers and service providers and expand the data bass to include pharmacists, hospitals, wholesalers and other medical professionals. Under the fax broadcasting service, PFN users can transmit a communication to 1,000 to 100,000 or more physicians overnight. Using fax on demand, physicians can call PFN, select information, and have it sent to them immediately. PFN will also provide its clients with various fax tools, as well as a reporting system giving information on which physicians have received a fax, what faxes have not gone through and the reason for failed transmission. Support services Steritek will offer users will include assistance with marketing applications, preparing messages, selecting a target audience, and integrating PFN's fax services with the user's direct mail and telemarketing programs. PFN can also supplement fax broadcasting with direct mail and/or telemarketing to reach physicians without fax machines. Steritek is using the AMA master file of U.S. physicians as the basis for its broadcast lists. The AMA file contains about 600,000 doctors, broken out into categories such as specialty or practice setting, roughly 340,000 of whom are office-based, patient-care physicians. Steritek has asked those doctors for their fax numbers and for permission to send them PFN items. The company expects to have about 250,000 doctors enrolled by January. Steritek will append the physician fax numbers to the AMA database and update the list on an ongoing basis. The database licensees that market the AMA list, which include Buckley-Dement Advertising, IMS America, Pharmaceutical Marketing Services and Medical Marketing Group, would use the PFN information and do the bulk of the marketing for Steritek's service. Clients may also come directly to Steritek. A similar physician facsimile information service will be launched Jan. 3 by Philadelphia-based Facsimile Science. The service was originally scheduled to be introduced in September ("The Pink Sheet" May 31, T&G-11).

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