Healthy Skepticism Library item: 782

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: news

Alarm sounded on ads in doctors' software
Australian Financial Review 2005 Jan 30

Full text:

Prescribing software used by GPs and proposed for some hospitals is riddled with advertisements and does not have enough independent information about the medicines being prescribed, a health expert and a consumer group says.

Already, this has led to cost blow-outs in the pharmaceutical benefits scheme and a failure to prescribe the best medicine. If nothing is done, these problems will get much worse, according to Ken Harvey, a former board member of Therapeutic Guidelines Ltd and now a senior lecturer in the School of Public Health at La Trobe University.

“None of the GP prescribing packages have got [enough comparative, independent information on drugs] and most are stuffed full of advertising,” he said.

Dr Harvey and the Australian Consumers Association want the advertisements dropped and replaced with independent information as well as comparisons of the price and efficacy of all the drugs available.

“If you’re a GP and you’re using the most popular prescribing package [then] when you write the prescription, enter the patient’s name or their blood pressure . . . it will flash advertising in your face . . . [and] it’s rarely for generic drugs or for a no-drug alternative,” he said.

The ACA, which is polling consumers on its website to gauge concern about advertising in prescribing software, said “advertisements are designed to sell things they’re not balanced information”. Doctors were being “deluged with ads in a way that is quite new”.

Dr Harvey said effects were already evident in PBS costs. Anti-arthritic drug Celebrex, for example, was introduced with “a huge amount of promotion”.

“But it had more nastier side-effects than first thought, and we know that they blew out the cost of the PBS enormously because they ended up being prescribed for tennis elbow rather than serious arthritis.”