Project Overview

The Prescription Project

Advancing Medical Practice and Policy

New drugs and medical devices are revolutionizing the practice of health care, curing disease, and improving quality of life.  Today, however, aggressive marketing to physicians by pharmaceutical and device industries is creating real and perceived conflicts of interest in the medical profession and raising questions about the appropriateness of treatment choices. These practices can compromise patient care, increase health care costs, and erode public confidence in the medical profession. 

Ensuring that industry-physician relationships are free of conflicts of interest and that physicians base their prescribing decisions on accurate and unbiased information is essential to promoting sound and cost effective health care.

The Prescription Project is led by Community Catalyst in partnership with the Institute on Medicine as a Profession.  Funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Project seeks to eliminate conflicts of interest created by industry marketing by promoting policy change among academic medical centers, professional medical societies and public and private payers. In addition the Project will advance state and national level policy solutions.

Working with a diverse group of stakeholders, the Project will champion recommendations made by a group of leading academics published in the January 2006 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association; the authors call upon academic medical centers to embrace policies that effectively govern financial ties between the medical profession and the industry, including prohibiting physicians from accepting industry gifts. 

The Project will encourage policies that foster greater reliance by physicians and payers on evidence-based, independent information, such as the evaluations published by the Oregon-based Drug Effectiveness Review Project.

Through a national outreach and education effort, the Project will also promote public and private-sector policy solutions that reduce conflicts of interest in the medical profession and appropriately expand the use of evidence-based medicine to maximize benefits and minimize risks to patients. Working with its partners, the Project will:

• Conduct research and issue reports that document the scope of the problem and examine its impact on health care quality and cost;
• Collaborate with leading academic medical centers, physician organizations, public and private health plans, consumer organizations, and policy makers to promote policy solutions and best practices;
• Assist academic medical centers and professional medical societies in adopting policy change initiatives;
• Develop state and national initiatives to maximize the use of evidence-based systems and reduce conflicts of interest; and
• Launch a national communications effort to raise awareness among physicians, payers, consumers, policy makers, media and the public about the need for reform.

The Project will sponsor a wide range of activities to achieve its goals, including research and policy analysis; national and community-based forums; outreach to the media; and meetings with key decision-makers, including deans of medical schools, health care administrators, business leaders, policy makers and consumers.