Some two years ago, a key European regulator spoke of a need to give patients access to more useful information on treatments so they could take a greater role in healthcare decisions.

 

The tricky part, warned James Copping, principal administrator of the European Commission Enterprise & Industry Directorate-General, was finding a way to let the drug industry provide information directly to consumers without breaking a law designed to protect the public from aggressive marketing of prescription pharmaceuticals. A regulation that bans pharmaceutical advertising throughout the European Union had just gone into affect when Copping spoke on April 16, 2006.

 

“It’s amazing to me that an industry which plays such an important part of our healthcare is often seen on par with the tobacco or the oil industry,” Copping said at the time. “It’s not clear to me why this is the case, but we need to develop good working relationships between all of us. We all agree that we need good quality information, but none of us can do it alone.”

 

Almost two-years to the day, the controversial EU-wide ban on drug advertising may soon end—although what this means, precisely, is unclear. The European commission plans to allow drug companies to give “information” about their drugs to the public on TV, the Internet and in print.

 

Leaders of the European pharmaceutical industry have once again stressed that they are not seeking, and have never sought, direct-to-consumer advertising for prescription medicines to be permitted within the European Union. However, what they do want is action. As Bayer Healthcare CEO Arthur Higgins, who is also president of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries Associations, said, “after years of debate, we call on all European institutions to develop a patient-centered EU framework for information provision without further delay.”

 

Industry is concerned about the EU proposals for a governance system for monitoring the information provided by the industry. The Commission suggests that enforcement could take place on three different levels—an EU advisory committee, the EU national authorities, and national “co-regulatory” bodies. But Europe’s pharmaceutical trade association believes this could potentially lead to a “patchwork” of very different interpretations and implementations in national laws, as is currently the case, and thus fail to adequately address the European dimension of the current shortcomings.

 

Instead, the industry proposes an alternative system based on an EU-wide “health information” code of conduct, including effective quality assessment procedures for information, ex-post control mechanisms (with involvement of third/independent parties) and robust enforcement procedures in case of breaches including sanctions as well as fines. Such a code could work alongside and complement the legislative change envisaged by the European Commission later this year.

 

On the one hand Europharma wants to have more options in the information-to-patients arena, but on the other they don’t want to unduly upset the apple cart. And they certainly don’t want “American-Style” advertising, even though direct-to-consumer advertising drives patients to visit their physicians, creates an environment for more robust doctor-patient conversations, enhances compliance, destigmatizes diseases such as depression, and does not increase prices.

 

As Julian Morris of the London-based International Policy Network quipped, “Europe is running out of failed alternatives.”

 

Some, such as the consumer advocacy group Health Action International, argue that there’s no health information gap in Europe. But others, such as Member of the European Parliament Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, one of the parliament's three representatives on the European Commission’s High Level Pharmaceutical Forum, finds the current information ban on medicines unacceptable.

 

"I can understand a ban on advertisements, but I cannot agree on the ban on information, which leads us to a situation where patients are obliged to surf around the Internet to look for information on medicines,” he said. “Citizens can not be deprived of information by their own governments on such crucial issues as one's health."

 

How about this as a recommendation: Let patients have access to information from every source and then let them speak with their physicians. That’s when good things happen.

Will better-informed consumers want broader access to more pharmaceutical options? Enough said. Information is Power.