This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related article  • Similar articles in this journal  Topic Collections  • Drug Therapy, Other  • Informatics/ Internet in Medicine  • Informatics, Other  • Alert me on articles by topic

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Alexander and coworkers¹ recently addressed the difficult issue of how physicians interact with patients to reduce patients’ out-of-pocket prescription costs. Among the most common barriers to discussions they identified was insufficient time spent with the patient by the physician. We wish to address a practical aspect of that barrier—the lack of ready access by physicians to objective, noncommercial, open-access information concerning the average retail cost associated with the administration and safety monitoring of a particular drug at a standard dosing level per unit of time.

Some commercial open-access drug information databases provide unit cost information for some but not all drugs, especially the newer high-cost biologic agents (eg, http://www.epocrates.com and http://www.drugstore.com). However, such information sources do not provide an estimate of the cost of laboratory testing and physician professional service required to monitor the safe use of drugs over time.

A research librarian and a pharmacy school faculty member . . . [Full Text of this Article]

AUTHOR INFORMATION
Richard Dennis Sontheimer, MD; Ursula M. Ellis, MLIS

RELATED ARTICLE

Physician Strategies to Reduce Patients’ Out-of-pocket Prescription Costs
G. Caleb Alexander, Lawrence P. Casalino, and David O. Meltzer
Arch Intern Med. 2005;165(6):633-636.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT