Finally A Very Noxious Element of Australian Health IT is to End

The Australian Health IT Community have had very good news today!

A highly reliable source has reported that the Health Communication Network (HCN) which markets a range of GP software (including Medical Director and PracSoft) has decided to remove drug advertising from their software over the next few months.

What used to happen was that as prescription printing was being entered and processed small and large advertisements for branded prescription drugs were displayed – presumably to remind the clinician which medicines were the best for their patients.

The offset for this advertising was a considerable reduction in the cost of the software.

This particular way of garnering revenue was seen by virtually every reputable observer (including the AMA, the National Prescribing Service, the Royal Australian College of General Practice) as being quite unacceptable.

I also understand that the Medicines Australia latest Code of Conduct revision bans all promotion in prescribing software (following similar pressure from many stakeholders including consumer organisations).

Given no company is going to willingly give up what is known to be significant revenue it seems as though all this pressure has finally been compelling!

Indeed this blog has tried to ramp up the pressure also and has pointed out on a number of occasions how unacceptable the practice is!

See:

http://aushealthit.blogspot.com/2008/10/useful-and-interesting-health-it-links_19.html

and

http://aushealthit.blogspot.com/2009/03/useful-and-interesting-health-it-news_22.html

and

http://aushealthit.blogspot.com/2009/02/useful-and-interesting-health-it-links_08.html

and

http://aushealthit.blogspot.com/2007/10/useful-and-interesting-health-it-links_14.html

HCN have always claimed their advertising would not influence clinical decision makers, but given the pharmaceutical companies were clearly prepared to pay for access to the advertising platform there can be no doubt they were assessing the results and would not have continued to spend if it had not been working.

Avid watchers of the Grunen Transfer on ABC1 and ABC2 will be clear as to the truth of this statement!

It is my hope we can now develop a genuinely competitive GP Software market where the best software is rewarded with market share – not the cheapest advertising supported product!

David.