Médicaments princeps vs. marché concurrentiel. De la motivation obligatoire,au contrôle des motifs médicaux ?

Physicians are free to prescribe the drugs they consider the best for their patients, and simultaneously required to seek healthcare’ cost-effectiveness — especially after patents expiry. While the physician choice of a given molecule is indisputable, French pharmacists gradually gained a large power to choose the brands on chemicals’ and biologics’ competitive markets. In May 2018, the highest judicial Court decided the physician must expressly motivate his exclusive choice of a given brand, and can not simply refuse the brand’ substitution by pharmacists. This unprecedented requirement is extrapolable to all substitutable drugs in France (registered generics and biosimilars). It raises the possible examination of medical choice motives — but in our opinion, it finishes, rather than it opens the arms race between prescribers and mandatory health insurers in France.     

Information du patient par le pharmacien en officine

The pharmacist, practicing in city pharmacy, has a duty of information of the patient, what is not easy within the framework of a sale of medicine in the presence of other customers. His duty exists that the medicine was prescribed or not, and his responsibility can be committed in both cases. These last years, the profession evolves with new perspectives as for the missions and for the role of the pharmacist. Since the law Hospital patients health territory (HPST) of 2009, in particular, the pharmacists mobilize to widen their missions with the patients so that their activity overtakes the simple dispensation of medicine. The pharmacist has to participate in the cooperation between healthcare professionals, in the mission of public service of the office of the care, in the therapeutic education and in the actions of support of the patients. So numerous novelties spread within pharmacies, either by a political will, through new regulations, or by initiatives appropriate to the pharmacists, in particular in the ordinal plan, with the pharmaceutical file.