The Facts

Medical information you can understand and use.

The benefit to you of SmartMEDinfo is based on these qualities:

Factual: gives the facts, not an advertising slant. Unlike other services, we have absolutely nodrug company influence.

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THE FACTS

• Total U.S. prescription drug expenditures are projected to hit over $497.5 billion by 2016. This is compared to $200.7 billion spent on U.S. prescriptions in 2005—a 148% increase.

• $200.7 billion was spent on prescription drugs in the U.S. in 2005, up from the $179.2 billion spent just two years before.

• Prescription drug expenses in the U.S. account for approximately 20% of total health expenses

• Employee healthcare is soaring faster than any other business cost, and prescription drug costs increase faster than any other health care expense.

• The majority of the top 25 grossing prescriptions are not lifesaving, and many of them were not even in existence a decade ago.

• 80.8% of the cost of employee healthcare was paid for out-of-pocket or by private insurance.

• Adverse drug effects (death or debility) have more than doubled in the last decade, as have FDA recalls of previously approved drugs.

• Adverse drug events injure an estimated 1.5 million people each year, at a cost of approximately $3.5 billion. These numbers do not factor in lost wages, productivity, or additional healthcare costs incurred as a result of these injuries.

• Adverse drug reactions are known to be responsible for between 3 percent and 12 percent of hospital admissions, and fatal drug reactions account for about 5 percent of deaths of those patients in hospitals in the United States. Adverse Drug Reactions are estimated to account for the seventh most common cause of death.

• Drugs are routinely prescribed for conditions for which the drug was not FDA approved, called “off label” prescribing.

• Three of the top five drugs prescribed to dependent children were optional with no clear medical indication, and amounted to $1.3 billion in costs.

SmartMedInfo.com™ gives consumers medical information they can understand and use, making it possible for patients to be in charge of their healthcare. Unlike other medical information sites, there is no drug company sponsorship or influence.

About Us

Our Founder, Moira Dolan, MD is a Board Certified Internal Medicine physician, founder of SmartMedInfo, and author of the forthcoming book, Smart Medicine©, which defines a new role for payers and patients in health care decisions.

Dr. Dolan is an experienced public speaker, whose audiences include emergency response personnel, school boards, elected officials, public health boards, physicians, public defenders, community groups, fraud examiners and University seminars and periodically testifies to legislative bodies as well as at FDA advisory committee hearings.

She provides consultations on ethics and integrity to private industry, government agencies, advocacy groups and the legal profession and is currently serving as Medical Consultant to the State of Texas for the Office of the Inspector General.

From her experience Dr. Dolan has developed an educational program to reverse these numbers, improve individual life conditions, and reduce the exorbitant health care costs plaguing employers today–The Informed Consent Education Program.

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