Willingness to pay to standardize patient medication information

ABSTRACT

Pharmacists dispense prescription drugs with leaflets containing information about the specific medication a patient receives. These leaflets vary in format, length, content, and readability for the same prescription drug at different pharmacies; they also vary for different prescription drugs at the same pharmacy. Previous research has found that most patients prefer standardization of these leaflets; however, standardization is costly, and there are no published studies that estimate the value of such standardization to consumers. We use a contingent valuation survey to investigate consumer willingness to pay for standardized informational leaflets in the retail pharmacy setting. We present results of analyses based on contingent valuation responses of 510 federal government employees. The survey design was a double-bounded advisory referendum elicitation format where respondents were presented with examples of standardized and non-standardized prescription drug information formats. The study found the willingness to pay for standardized informational leaflets was approximately $1.37 per household per month. The estimated willingness to pay is sensitive to alternative econometric specifications, evidence of possible survey response bias; however, across all models, the estimates are statistically and economically significant.

KEYWORDS:

• Willingness to pay
• contingent valuation
• information
• prescription drugs

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Sheri Walker and Lizzi Quin for their comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank the FDA’s Risk Communication staff for helping to develop and run the survey. Finally, we would like to thank staff from the FDA’s Office of Medical Policy in Center for Drug Evaluation and Research for their helpful comments and suggestions in developing the survey and the sample leaflets, as well as in testing the survey.

Disclosure statement

This article was prepared by the authors in their private capacity. No official support or endorsement by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or the Federal Aviation Administration is intended or should be inferred.

Notes

¹ FDA’s Centre for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) created the non-standardized leaflets for the fictional drug to replicate leaflets currently available from retail pharmacies. The standardized leaflet was also created by CDER, originally for use in Scales et al. (2012).

² The GS pay scale has Grades 1–15 with ten steps in each grade. The GS-grade level ranges have some overlap resulting in overlapping income categories. For 2019 for the Washington-Baltimore-Arlington, DC-MD-WV-PA locality annual pay for GS 1–6 is in the range of $24,633–55,006; GS 7–12 is in the range of $47,016–108,422; GS 13–15 is in the range of $99,172–166,500. Senior-level federal employees would earn above an employee on the GS-15 scale, which ranges from $137,849 to $166,500. We have no expectation of the income for a respondent who selected ‘Other.’