AI: Clinical Decision Support - now with ads

[Chris Johnston]

Pharma companies must be rubbing their hands in glee at the opportunity to advertising directly clinicians seeking treatment recommendations.

We are so far behind the curve with the need for robust legislation, and now we'll have point-of-care embedded advertising to contend with as well.

Advertising in AI-Powered Clinical Decision Support Tools

[Debra Turnbull]

@Chris-Johnston

So, many decades ago (I'm not saying how many), I did a summer stint with a company that produced script pads. These were those paper prescription pads that doctors would write instructions for the pharmacy to fill your prescription: drug name, dose, how to take, etc. They would write by hand, tear off the top page and hand you the paper. You left the appointment, went to your pharmacy, and handed over the piece of paper. Then the pharmacist would fill your prescription; based on what was written on that piece of paper.

These paper pads were created where every 6 pages were scripts (Patient_Name at the top; doctor's signature line at the bottom) and the 7th page would be a glossy advertisement for a drug. The pharmaceutical companies would fund the production of the pads and provide the ads to be used. The company I worked for would design the script and send the designs to the printers.

To this day, I still remember watching my doctor fill in a script, make a mistake, scratch out, tear off the page and throw it in the garbage... hit an ad, tear-off and throw-in-garbage... and carry on to the 3rd page to properly write out my script. At the time, I found that process somewhat interesting.

I see parallels between these 2 workflows... other than nowadays, the CDS software would probably delay the ads before a manual override-to-clear would activate. (It's like those irritating ads that show up when you're surfing the net. You can never get rid of them fast enough.)

Unfortunately, tear-off and throw-in-garbage will not work here.