The little pink pill recently got a retail boost. Addyi, a drug that treats low libido in premenopausal women, has been on the market for more than a decade after a controversial approval. But in December the Food and Drug Administration expanded its use, approving the daily drug for all women under 65.
More women than ever now could qualify for the pill — and its maker, Sprout Pharmaceuticals, made it easy for them to find out. On its Instagram account, in Facebook ads, and on its website, Sprout shared how women could get a quick consult for an Addyi prescription: With a special code, PINKPILL, they could get a telehealth visit for just $10.
Drugmakers have long used discount coupons to encourage patients to use their high-cost medications. Now, coupons can influence not just a drug’s out-of-pocket price, but the cost of consulting with a clinician who can prescribe it.
For Addyi, those consultations and discounts are managed by a telehealth company called Prescribery — one of several that work with drugmakers to help patients “talk to a doctor now” about their products. “We give them the coupon codes that they can use, and they get to market it to drive additional business,” said Prescribery’s CEO and CFO Ross Pope. “That’s sort of our arrangement, where they’re driving more business, both for them and for us.”
As links between pharmaceutical companies and telehealth providers grow, health policy experts and legislators have sounded alarms. Telehealth companies can receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in pharma fees a year. Critics have questioned whether those partnerships break federal laws prohibiting financial kickbacks to induce prescribing, highlighting their potential to promote uncoordinated care and overprescription of unnecessary, and often expensive, branded medications.
The same questions, they say, apply to coupons extended for a drug-specific telehealth visit. “These discount structures are one more piece of the same puzzle,” said Daniel Eisenkraft Klein, a postdoctoral fellow at the Program on Regulation, Therapeutics, and Law at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. “It’s this big financial architecture that’s every step of the way designed to move patients toward the specific drug cheaply and quickly.”
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