Healthy Skepticism Library item: 20069

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Magazine

Marshal T
Hijacked by ads
Australian Doctor 2004 Sep 1719

Full text:

Editor: With reference to your article ‘GPs paid peanuts for data’ (12 November), the issue runs deeper than assisting CAMM Pacific to obtain data for pharmaceutical companies’ financial gain.
Hundreds of times a day I am bombarded with ads by pharmaceutical companies through my use of HCN’s Medical Director, which I believe is being used by most doctors in clinical practice in this country.

An ad pops up for about six seconds every time a script is written. Let’s assume, on average, for each patient two scripts are printed. And assume that an average doctor sees 50 patients a day and works 300 days a year.

I estimate doctors spend 50 hours a year looking at these ads (12 seconds per patient x 50 patients x 300 days = 180,000 seconds or 50 hours).

Assuming a standard 10-minute consultation is worth $50, the cost would amount to about $225 million (assuming 15,000 Australian doctors use this software).

The problem is that it is difficult to change to another provider once you get hooked on such software.

The top priority for the General Practice Computing Group should be to investigate ways of enabling doctors to easily switch to other software programs if they aren’t happy with their current software. If this was possible, I would like to be at the start of the queue that I suspect would stretch from Sandringham to Sydney.