PURPOSE Spontaneous inquiries about the development of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) to medicines can be extracted based on the questions posted by the general public on the electronic Japanese bulletin board "Yahoo! Japan Chiebukuro". Our aim was to clarify the characteristics related to people's descriptions of suspected ADRs and determine the reasons for submitting a spontaneous inquiry. M...

We study the impact of product margins on pharmacies’ incentive to promote generics instead of brand-names. First, we construct a theoretical model where pharmacies can persuade patients with a brand-name prescription to purchase a generic version instead. We show that pharmacies’ substitution incentives are determined by relative margins and relative patient copayments. Second, we exploit a un...

Twitter has been proposed by several studies as a means to track public health trends such as influenza and Ebola outbreaks by analyzing user messages in order to measure different population features and interests. In this work we analyze the number and features of mentions on Twitter of drug brand names in order to explore the potential usefulness of the automated detection of drug side effec...

Many companies place advertisements on search engine result pages, a practice referred to as search engine advertising (SEA). If their website also appears among the organic results, it is questionable whether SEA makes sense: Free clicks may be substituted by costly clicks on the advertisement (paid result). We propose a model that determines when paid results complement organic results and wh...

BACKGROUND Patient and public involvement (PPI) is central to research and service planning. Identifying effective, meaningful ways of involvement is challenging. The cohort study 'Do specialist services for teenagers and young adults with cancer add value?' follows young people for three years, examining outcomes associated with specialist care. Participant retention in longitudinal research c...

Brand Names: Cardigox (Belgium); Cardiogoxin (Argentina); Cardioxin (India); Digacin (Germany); Digitek (US); Digomal (Italy); Digosin (Japan, Korea); Digoxina (Peru); Digoxine Navtivelle (France); Digoxin-Sandoz (Benin, Burkina-Faso, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Ivory-Coast, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Niger, Kuwait, Oman, Qutar, Saudi-Arabia, United-Arab-...

Intellectual property is every bit as important as physical property. For many corporations, intangible assets like brands and trademarks are even more valuable than tangible assets (Hopkins, 2003). For example, the Coca-Cola brand name is far more valuable than the ingredients that go into a can of Coca-Cola (Hopkins, 2003). Businesses expend a great deal of time, energy, and resources to prot...

An older adult was admitted to hospital with a diagnosis of new-onset seizures. Admission orders included initiation of the anticonvulsant phenytoin (handwritten using the brand name Dilantin), 300 mg orally every evening. Before the pharmacy closed, a pharmacy staff member who was new to the clinical area entered the Dilantin order into the pharmacy computer system, so that the medication coul...

We study the relationship between regulatory regimes and pharmaceutical firms’ pricing strategies using a unique policy experiment from Norway, which in 2003 introduced a reference price (RP) system called “index pricing” for a sub-sample of off-patent pharmaceuticals, replacing the existing price cap (PC) regulation. We estimate the effect of the reform using a product level panel dataset, cov...