he government could start paying impartial experts to visit doctors to talk about the safety, effectiveness and cost of prescription drugs and other treatments.
The idea would be to give presentations along the lines of those given by company drug reps. But the federally funded presentations would provide a counterweight to the industry messages on specific drugs.
pdfA bill to that end is likely to be introduced today in both houses of Congress, according to the Prescription Project, a nonprofit that backs this sort of thing. (To see the bill language, click on the PDF image at right.)
The bill would expand on an idea that’s been around for a while now. Pennsylvania has funded one such program, and Harvard doc Jerry Avorn has been a big booster of the practice, sometimes called “academic detailing.”
Sen. Herb Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat, held a hearing on the issue earlier this year, and he’s one of the sponsors of the bill.
A draft of the bill we read today doesn’t specify how much the feds would spend on the program, but it authorizes the government to contract with nonprofit groups such as medical societies and schools of medicine and pharmacy to create educational materials.
The bill also directs officials to contract with 10 entities — drawn from academic institutions, state or local governments and non-profit groups — to “train and deploy healthcare professionals to educate physicians and other drug prescribers.”
