Several months after a group of senators sent letters to Pfizer and Eli Lilly investigating their respective direct-to-consumer telehealth platforms, the lawmakers are now directing similar queries toward several of the platforms’ partners.
PfizerForAll and LillyDirect both went live in 2024 and offer access to virtual and in-person care and prescription medications and other health products delivered right to a user’s doorstep.
In October, Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois, Peter Welch of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont sent near-identical letters to the two Big Pharmas. The missives each included a list of 13 questions, all aimed at digging into “the nature of [each company’s] relationship with contracted telehealth prescribers.”
According to the senators, despite the drugmakers’ assurances that the doctors employed by their telehealth provider partners are free to prescribe any appropriate medication, regardless of its maker, the fact that the service is coming from a company-branded platform “appears intended to steer patients toward particular medications and creates the potential for inappropriate prescribing that can increase spending for federal health care programs.”
The legislators picked up their pens again this week to send similar queries to five telehealth companies that have held contracts with Lilly or Pfizer: 9amHealth, Thirty Madison, Form Health, Populus Health Technologies and UpScriptHealth.
The new set of letters largely echo those sent to the drugmakers, including a verbatim reiteration of the senators’ belief that the inherent nature of the platforms creates the potential for fraud.
“Unsurprisingly, a patient coming straight from Pfizer’s website to a telehealth appointment with a prescriber chosen by Pfizer is overwhelmingly more likely to ask for Pfizer’s medication,” they wrote in one version of the letter. “Further, that prescriber may have an incentive to prescribe such medication, whether or not it is medically necessary or clinically appropriate. Payments by Pfizer hold the potential to induce specific actions of the prescribing pen.”
Once again, each letter concludes with a list of 13 questions, again featuring some overlaps with those sent to Pfizer and Lilly. The questions probe, for example, whether the pharmas “direct, encourage, or educate” the telehealth providers to prescribe their own medications; if the contracted providers are restricted from or rewarded for prescribing any specific drugs; and what the financial terms of their contracts look like.
The telehealth companies have been given until April 15 to respond to the questions.
In their own responses to the senators’ inquiries last fall, both Pfizer and Lilly emphasized the independence of their contracted telehealth partners, claiming that they do not incentivize the doctors in any way to prescribe their own drugs, Endpoints reported at the time.
Lilly also reportedly seized the opportunity to direct the senators’ attention to another issue then top of mind for the company: telehealth companies that sell compounded versions of drugs like Lilly’s GLP-1 tirzepatide, with the drugmaker labeling such knockoffs as “unsafe and untested.”
The spat between GLP-1 kingpins Lilly and Novo Nordisk and sellers of compounded drugs reached a fever pitch last month, as telehealth giant Hims & Hers released a Super Bowl ad nodding to their own compounded versions of obesity meds, prompting pointed responses from both companies. The conflict has since been rendered largely moot for Lilly, however—at least on the GLP-1 front—as a court ruled this month that compounders must stop producing their versions of tirzepatide.