- Published date :
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Dec 10, 2008
- Expired date :
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Dec 10, 2040
Expansion of PhRMA guidelines encourages physician/patient education and dialogue
December 10, 2008 – Wilmington, DE – AstraZeneca (NYSE: AZN) today announced support for PhRMA’s expanded, updated guidelines for direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising. The voluntary Principles are designed to ensure that DTC advertising provides accurate, accessible and useful health information to patients and consumers, and to foster communication between patients and health care professionals.
AstraZeneca has already adopted many of the measures included in the new guidelines, which will go into effect in March 2009. In 2007, AstraZeneca established policies that ensure its DTC advertising responsibly educates patients 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 practitioners and patients for tone, content and clarity of benefit/risk messages
- Being the first major pharmaceutical company to advertise patient assistance programs in its DTC advertising. In fact, 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.
“Our goal is to help the right patient get the right medicine at the right time,” said Mark Mallon, vice president of marketing and sales for AstraZeneca. "These expanded guidelines will benefit patients and their doctors by helping to ensure that information included in DTC advertisements is not only relevant, balanced and accurate, but also encourages conversations between patients and their doctors.”
Research shows that DTC advertising raises disease awareness, fosters patient education, enhances the patient/physician dialogue, and helps patients understand the importance of taking their medication as prescribed. AstraZeneca has conducted its own research into responsible DTC advertising, which found that there is a point of diminishing return for the number of risks communicated in television advertising:
- According to the data, consumers remembered less information about both the risks and benefits when more than five risks were communicated.
- Additionally, consumers were more likely to remember only the less serious side effects when more than five risks were communicated.
The full results of this study will be published in the spring of 2009. For a full list of the PhRMA Guiding Principles on Direct to Consumer Advertisements About Prescription Medicines, please visit www.phrma.org/dtc.
About AstraZeneca
AstraZeneca is a major international healthcare business engaged in the research, development, manufacturing and marketing of meaningful prescription medicines and supplier for healthcare services. AstraZeneca is one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies with healthcare sales of $29.55 billion and is a leader in gastrointestinal, cardiovascular, neuroscience, respiratory, oncology and infectious disease medicines. In the United States, AstraZeneca is a $13.35 billion dollar healthcare business with 12,200 employees committed to improving people’s lives. AstraZeneca is listed in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (Global) as well as the FTSE4Good Index.
For more information about AstraZeneca, please visit: www.astrazeneca-us.com.
Media Contacts:
- Leslie Pott, AstraZeneca: 302-885-6453
