During the ‘Pharmacy and medication management’ breakout panel, Peter Ax, founder and CEO of KwikMed gave a very interesting presentation about their “internet prescribing” system. His presentation started with a funny joke that 7 years ago he got spammed by a viagra advert so he went ahead and bought the company that sent it. KwikMed has since then developed a sophisticated internet prescribing system that uses a database of thousands of questions to determine whether a patient is eligible for a presciption within a limited range of therapeutic areas that include erectile dysfunction, hair loss and smoking cessation.
However the punchline of the presentation was that Mayo Clinic Proceedings had released a study in August that concluded that KwikMeds internet prescribing system was equally safe to traditional prescribing.
The study used a stratified, random sampling technique to “compare KwikMed emedicine records to records from a traditional multidisciplinary primary care system from the Salt Lake City, UT, area to compare the noninferiority safety of prescribing PDE-5 inhibitors between the systems” and concluded that “safety in prescribing PDE-5 inhibitors for erectile dysfunction was similar between a US-based, state-regulated Internet prescribing system and a multispecialty primary care system”.
It’s important to note that this system replaces the face-to-face meeting between physician and patient, but it is still a physician in the end who reviews the patient file and issues or denies the prescription.
This system is surely impressive and might lead to internet prescribing becoming a more accepted model across a wider range of therapeutic areas. Of course internet prescribing is a widely debated topic in the medical community with many critics as this statement by Pfizer lawyer Arnold Friede shows; “Internet pseudo prescribing is the functional equivalent of pushing amphetamines at a truck stop.” We’d love to get your opinion about this so please leave your comment.
