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Americans may soon be able to get cholesterol-lowering medications and other widely used prescription drugs without seeing a doctor, a first step in what could amount to sweeping changes to how patients access treatments for chronic conditions.
The Food and Drug Administration in a draft guideline on Tuesday outlined how such a status, which the agency said could help lower health-care costs, would work. Patients could answer questions on a mobile-phone app to help determine whether they should be able to access a medication without a prescription.
"Our hope is that the steps we're taking to advance this new, more modern framework will contribute to lower costs for our health care system overall and provide greater efficiency and empowerment for consumers by increasing the availability of certain products that would otherwise be available only by prescription," FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in a statement.
Order your drugs from a smartphone app.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Thursday July 19 2018, @02:04PM
Back in my Madison Avenue days Pfizer was one of my clients. At the time we were working on a campaign for them for a drug that combined Lipitor with some other drug commonly prescribed along with Lipitor. The reason was Lipitor was on the verge of losing its exclusivity and generics were waiting to jump into the market; if they re-mixed Lipitor with another drug they could presumably prolong their lock on the market. Lipitor constitutes a huge share of Pfizer's revenue, 60% I think it was then, so they were eager to not have generics eat into that.
So this I read as trying to go the other way, to make up in volume by selling OTC what they lost selling at a premium. It's a play on their name recognition.
Washington DC delenda est.