Marketing Health Care Products on the Internet: A Proposal for Updated Federal Regulations

Abstract

The Internet offers pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers a dynamic new medium for promoting their products—a medium that might actually be better suited for health care product promotion than print or television. On the Internet's World Wide Web (Web) pages, drug and device makers can produce interactive marketing and advertising material that more easily complies with current Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) disclosure requirements. Navigation buttons and hypertext links can facilitate compliance with such information disclosure requirements by allowing drug and device makers to “hide” the brief summaries or labels until interested viewers “click” on them. Despite the appropriateness of the medium, however, a Web search today will turn up less drug and medical device promotion than one might expect. In fact, the Web, which represented $7 billion in commerce in 1997 and is expected to account for $20 billion in 1998, is strangely quiet on this front.