Drug Websites play up benefits, play down risks–study

Drug company Web sites tend to play up their drug’s benefits, play down the drug’s risks and offer discounts that may not, in the end, be such a good deal, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Washington and the Boise VA Medical Center.

The paper appears in the current issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Roughly one in four Americans say they have gone online looking for information about prescription drugs.

Indeed, when Americans want to learn about a prescription drug, they say they now consult the Internet more often than they consult their physicians.

But Internet searches, even with such general key words as “high cholesterol”, often direct patients to drug company-sponsored sites, said the lead author of the Archives study Dr. William G. Weppner, an acting instructor at UW and a staff physician at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Boise, Idaho.

This gives the drug companies the opportunity to “exploit patients’ interest” in a drug or condition to promote their products, Dr. Weppner said.

To find out how drug companies were using their Web sites to provide information about their products, Dr. Weppner and coworkers searched the Internet for the manufacturer-sponsored Web sites of the top 50 brand-name medications in the US.

Weppner and his coworkers found that while the Web sites provided information about risks, as is required by law, information about a drug’s benefits were much more likely to be presented prominently in a larger font, for example, and with more attractive graphics.

Information about risks and adverse effects, on the other hand, was often given less prominence by, for example, being displayed in a smaller font at the bottom of a home page or on another page altogether.

They also found that 60 percent of the Web sites offered vouchers for free samples or coupons for discounts.

In many cases, the offer for free samples and discounts were prominently displayed at the bottom of the information about the drug’s benefits—presenting the offer before the patient would have reached the information about risks.

Weppner says research has shown that when patients come to their doctors asking for a drug they’ve seen in such direct-to-consumer drug advertising, their doctors are more likely to prescribe that drug.

The discounts also increase the likelihood that the doctor will prescribe that particular drug, even when the drug may not be the cheapest available or the best drug for the patient, Weppner said.

Studies have shown that such promotions “motivate people—whether they’re providers or patients—to use medications that they would not have otherwise used,” he said.

The drug industry defends such direct-to-consumer promotions as an effective way to teach patients about new treatments, to help them try out new drugs, and make to drugs more affordable.

Dr. Weppner’s study found, however, that on average the yearly value of the free sample vouchers was just $86 and of the discounts just $75, while the annual retail cost averaged about $1,559 for the drugs promoted with vouchers and $1180 for those promoted with discounts.

As a result, while patients may think they are saving money by taking advantage of voucher and discount offers, they may, in fact, end up paying more, either through higher copays or premiums, than they would had they gone with a lower cost generic drug, Dr. Weppner said.

“In the end, their downstream costs will be higher,” Dr. Weppner said. “They’re trading a short-term gain for a long-term loss.”

To learn more:

• Read the paper “Direct-to-Consumer Offers for Free and Discounted Medications on the Internet: A Content Analysis of “e-Samples“.

Tags: Coupons, Direct-to-Consumer Ads, Discounts, Drugs, Internet, Prescriptions

Category: Drugs & Medicines