Deerfield, IL – Walgreens Boots Alliance is continuing its partnership with patient community, PatientsLikeMe, and has recently expanded the range of the drug reviews that it publishes on Walgreens.com. Fueled by the first-hand patient experiences that are being shared on PatientsLikeMe, Walgreens.com reviews will now go beyond just information on side effects to include things like drug effectiveness, and what drugs the patients had taken before and after trying that particular treatment.
There are checks and balances to PatientsLikeMe’s reporting system. The key is to make sure that the reported experiences are referencing accurate and proper dosages of the reviewed drug. They have a health data integrity team to vet information, passionate members actively police their own community, and there are even some automatic digital guardrails to ensure dosages are entered correctly.
Why this matters:
Brad Gescheider, senior director of care solutions for PatientsLikeMe, sums up the potential power of this new type of review: “It’s meant to help level up conversations that patients and doctors are having together and move away from the ethos of paternalistic medicine. The challenge behind all other available information around treatments is that they’re required to show the entire package insert. What we’ve found in our anecdotal research is that the the majority of people do not read it [in its entirety].”
More than simply cutting through clinical information overload, this review format also starts to provide context and balance for patients researching new therapies. It helps to paint a more complete, more human picture of the treatment, and hopefully powers more effective conversations with their doctor.
