Open drug databases compete for consumers

Revolution Health, an on-line service offering health care and drug information to the US public, is offering a combination of expert content by trusted third parties and the personal experience of thousands of patients. Its new product, the Medicine Chest, carries medical and pharmacological data on 11,000 products for over 600 conditions at: www.revolutionhealth.com/drugs-treatments. A separate initiative (patientslikeme.com), is a social network for people to discuss experiences, good and bad, about their treatments which shares data with health care providers.

The adoption of Internet search engine technology to provide high-quality data to patients is creating a new avenue for getting information about prescription drugs. In doing so, the public is able to bypass traditional gate-keepers to pharmaceutical data, adding to both the opportunity and threat that self-medication offers, given the ready availability of some products on-line (Marketletters passim).