Healthy Skepticism Library item: 7832

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: Journal Article

Haberman DJ, Clifton GD.
Development of an automated service to support access to pharmaceutical companies' patient assistance program
ASHP Midyear Clinical Meeting 2001 Dec; 36:

Abstract:

Medications are the most cost effective means of treating many acute and chronic diseases. Unfortunately, a large number of individuals in our community do not have access to medications because they lack insurance or the means to pay for drug therapies. In response to this problem, we have developed an automated system to support health care providers in serving the prescription needs of these patients. This system assists in obtaining free pharmaceuticals from pharmaceutical companies’ patient assistance programs. Since 1992, the drug industry has provided systematic drug assistance programs for the poor. These programs are currently underutilized, as they are cumbersome and require arduous attention to detail, tracking, and the completion of an inordinate amount of paperwork. We have developed a centralized, systematic approach that supports community clinics. A custom-built software, called MEDS, has been developed that interfaces with RxAssist, a web-based software created by Volunteers in Health Care. RxAssist brings together at one site all known information about company-sponsored patient assistance programs. MEDS makes the process more efficient by providing tracking mechanisms for clinics, health care providers, and patients. Additionally, information is maintained on patients’ income and insurance status along with their medication needs. The program drafts individual patient applications for clinics and applies for the medicines on the clinic’s and patient’s behalf. A tickler system has been incorporated to alert providers that patients are nearing the end of their medication supply, thus minimizing gaps in chronic pharmacotherapy.

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909