Online sales of prescription drugs: pros and cons

The State Duma in the first reading adopted amendments to the law on the circulation of medicines, proposing to conduct an experiment, during which prescription drugs in a number of regions of the Russian Federation will be sold online.

The experiment will be conducted for 3 years, starting March 1, 2023. Its participants will be able to legally sell prescription drugs online, the list of which will be approved separately. It is now known that drugs containing narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances, as well as drugs with an ethyl alcohol content of more than 25%, cannot be sold in this way.

Commenting on this legislative innovation, Nelly Ignatieva, Executive Director of the Russian Association of Pharmacy Chains, during a press conference at DOS, recalled that the previously introduced online sale of OTC drugs had a negative impact on patient safety:

“We have allowed the remote sale of over-the-counter drugs during the pandemic. More than 2 years have passed since then, and during this period we got acquainted with the new information function of Roszdravnadzor, which already informs patients that they need to be vigilant when buying medicines on the Internet. For more than 2 years, Roszdravnadzor, together with Roskomnadzor, has been monitoring website pages on an ongoing basis, and about 23,000 such websites have already been blocked. As practice has shown, counterfeit or falsified drugs can be sold on such pages, which simply cannot be called medicines.

As Nelly Ignatieva noted, the professional community is also concerned about some conceptual confusion in the draft law:

“We went to the electronic prescription for a very long time. This was done so that we could control the entire information component: where the prescription was written, by whom it was written and for which patient. We learn all this, because all this directly affects the safety of the patient. And suddenly we get a bill (the one that has already been adopted in the first reading), and an interesting phrase appears in it that drugs can be dispensed “by prescription, including electronic prescription.” From this we can conclude that suddenly a paper prescription appears again? And if a paper prescription appears again, then this makes us, as specialists, doubly wary.”

As Nelli Ignatieva emphasized, “we (the Russian Association of Pharmacy Chains – S.I.) are for the development of technologies, but these technologies should serve the benefit of our dear patients, and we are talking, first of all, about their safety”:

“We must minimize risks, not open a Pandora’s box. And this is exactly what will happen if a paper prescription suddenly appears again.

The second participant of the press conference, the head of the League of Patient Defenders, Alexander Saversky, agreed with all the concerns expressed, but at the same time he recalled the existence of a “certain global trend” of competition between online and offline trade:

“We live in a time when the very existence of pharmacies is under a large number of threats. And the bill that we are discussing today is one of them, big systemic, and, I’m afraid, inevitable. In fact, we are talking about delivery, around which life begins to be built. This delivery in this situation predetermines, and who will deliver the medicines to the patient – a pharmacy or a large warehouse with couriers, which is much cheaper, more convenient? From a business point of view, by removing pharmacies, we are removing an extra link. But is this link really redundant? The question is the professional status of this link. If we are talking from a business point of view, then yes, of course, why do I need a pharmacy if the courier from the warehouse brings 20% cheaper. But where is the pharmacist in this story? It is clear that it is more convenient and easier for a patient in a number of situations to purchase medicine online (for example, when a child falls ill with a single mother or a single disabled person needs to buy a medicine), but what is the price for this simplicity?

So, as Alexander Saversky summarized, if you remove security issues, then by purchasing medicines online, you save money, but at the same time you remove professional competence from this scheme, which helps you and protects you from making some wrong decisions.

Sergei Ishkov.

Photo by Moskovskaya Pravda