AstraZeneca believes responsible Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) advertising is integral to raising disease awareness, fostering patient education, enhancing the patient/physician dialogue and encouraging medication adherence.
Awareness about diseases
We are committed to providing accurate, balanced, and timely information about our medicines and the conditions they treat. Such information creates awareness about serious diseases and conditions, and encourages patients to talk to their physicians or other healthcare professionals about their health.
- According to a 2008 DTC study, twenty-five percent of adult patients who visit their doctor after seeing a DTC ad receive a new diagnosis of a condition.
- A FDA patient survey on DTC advertising also revealed that nearly one-in-five patients reported speaking to a doctor about a condition for the first time because of a DTC advertisement.
Responsibility to patients and caregivers
At AZ, our goal is to help the right patient get the right drug, at the right time. We work with the FDA to communicate benefit/risk profile that is balanced, responsible and encourages doctor-patient relationship. We are committed to providing patients and caregivers with clear, responsible advertisements that:
- are educational in tone and content
- encourage patients to seek guidance from their healthcare professional
- contain information about our prescription savings programs. In a year-long survey of more than 12,000 patients who contacted the company for information on our prescription savings programs, nearly 10% of the patients cited our DTC advertisements as the reason they become aware of our programs.
Responsibility to healthcare professionals
AstraZeneca believes we have a responsibility to provide healthcare professionals with the information they need in order to have a productive dialogue with their patients, including conversations about taking their medicines as prescribed. We accomplish this by:
- Conducting an evaluation of physician awareness and acceptance of our new medicines or indications, prior to airing a new broadcast DTC advertisement
- Reviewing broadcast advertising with health care professionals and patients for tone, content and clarity of benefit/risk messages
- Ensuring health care professionals have the information they need about medication adherence
- Seeking FDA’s input prior to airing new broadcast DTC advertisements
- Being the first major pharmaceutical company to advertise patient assistance programs in its DTC advertising.
Our role is to ensure that the content of direct-to-consumer broadcast advertising is accurate, appropriate, and has been thoroughly considered prior to initiation. For a full list of the PhRMA Guiding Principles on Direct to Consumer Advertisements About Prescription Medicines, please visit www.phrma.org/dtc.
