Let’s say you work for a drugmaker and want to generate awareness of your meds and, of course, generate more scrips by placing product info in a doctor’s waiting room. And let’s say you decided to use an interactive kiosk with patient questionnaires about ‘disease states.’ Would you run the risk of violating anti-kickback laws? In a recent opinion, the HHS Office of Inspector General says ‘no,’ but only if you avoid doing a few things.

Such as? Don’t offer patients coupons, offers of free items or anything else of value for filling out a questionnaire. Make sure the questionnaire doesn’t collect any patient info and that the printout from the kiosk doesn’t mention specific drugs. And don’t pay the doc for taking up office space or engage in any other quid pro quo. Of course, Lewis Morris, chief counsel to the OIG, is hip to the potential for abuse and warns drugmakers to be careful in his advisory opinion…

“Our conclusion that the kiosks are not remuneration to patients for purposes of the antikickback statute does not mean that the proposed arrangement does not pose other risks to patients and Federal health care programs. It is apparent to us that the kiosks are contrivances designed to elicit patient inquiries regarding the four disease states for which requestor’s drugs are indicated. Like their paper brochure analogues, which are commonly found in physician offices, the kiosks are a type of direct to consumer advertising.

“DTC advertising is often used by pharmaceutical manufacturers to generate additional utilization of their products by encouraging consumers to initiate discussions with their physicians about the advertised product or the symptoms for which it is indicated. Such sales techniques increase the risk of overutilization, as well as the risk of increased costs to patients who are influenced to choose name-brand drugs instead of less costly generic equivalents. They may also implicate Federal or state consumer protection laws, FDA regulations, or Federal Trade Commission regulations.”

Hat tip to the FDA Law blog