Influence of an e-mail with a drug information attachment on sales of prescribed drugs: a randomized controlled study

Abstract

Background: To provide doctors with producer-independent information to facilitate choice of treatment is an important task. The objective of the present study was to evaluate if an e-mail with a drug information attachment has effects on sales of prescribed drugs and if the design of the attachment is of importance.

Effects of e-mails containing ADR information and a current case report on ADR reporting rate and quality of reports

“…Another limitation of the study is that we do not know whether the intervention actually reached the target population. However, the "e-mail attachment" system has been on-going for several years and has been shown to influence the sales of prescribed drugs, indicating that the system seems to be working properly [15]. On the other hand, heads of primary health care units could be more inclined to push their doctors to prescribe cost-effective drugs according to producerindependent drug information, thus improving the local budget of the unit, rather than to push their doctors to report ADRs, an action which does not directly benefit the unit, but is of worldwide interest for safe drug use.…”

“…The "e-mail attachment" system has been used since 2005, and approximately 25 e-mails are distributed each year. This system has been shown to influence sales of prescribed drugs, indicating that the e-mails are read by primary care doctors and considered to these individuals to be trustworthy [15].…”

Email for clinical communication between healthcare professionals

“…We excluded eleven studies in the original review (see Characteristics of excluded studies table). We excluded eight of these because they concerned one-way rather than two-way communication between healthcare professionals (Lester 2004;Feldman 2005;Mandall 2005;Lester 2006;Edward 2007;Ward 2008;Johansson 2009;Chen 2010). In three studies, email was part of a multifaceted intervention and the email component was not assessed separately (Jaatinen 2002;Persell 2008;Ward 2008).…”

“…These included a study of email used to provide discharge summaries (Chen 2010) and another for referring patients for orthodontic treatment (Mandall 2005). Several studies attempted to influence health professional behaviour via email with regard to prescribing behaviours (Lester 2006;Edward 2007;Persell 2008), reporting of adverse drug reactions (Johansson 2009), knowledge of and management of tests pending at discharge (Dalal 2012) and provision of health care (Lester 2004;Feldman 2005;Murtaugh 2005;Atlas 2011). These studies could be deemed relevant for a separate review considering email use between healthcare professionals for administrative purposes (e.g.…”

“…Communication was one-way rather than two-way between healthcare professionals Edward 2007 Communication was one-way rather than two-way between healthcare professionals…”