Quality evaluation of online platforms information for retail of prescription medicines in China: an observational study of the case of paroxetine

TL;DR

This study evaluates the quality of information provided by Chinese online platforms selling the prescription drug paroxetine, finding most platforms lack comprehensive, accurate, and reliable information.

Contribution

The study introduces a quality evaluation framework for online prescription medicine retail platforms in China using the DISCERN instrument.

Findings

Most platforms (73.53%) provided only fair quality information for paroxetine.

Many platforms lacked prescription validation and professional pharmacy services.

Only 5.88% of platforms were rated as excellent in information quality.

Abstract

This study aimed to generate evidence to help improve the quality of information provided by Chinese online platforms for retail of prescription medicines, as a baseline for enhancing the supervision by the regulatory authorities of internet retail of prescription medicines to offer comprehensive, accurate and reliable information to consumers.

This is an observational study to investigate the quality of the information provided by two key types of online platforms in China that sell paroxetine online, a common mental health medication. The authors utilized the DISCERN with the Likert 5 scale, a validated instrument comprising three domains and 16 items to assess the comprehensiveness, accuracy and reliability of information provided by a total of 34 Chinese online platforms. We firstly examined whether these online platforms have been diligent in their duty to provide appropriate retail service-related information (e.g. delivery, payment, return policies) for prescription medications. We also evaluated the quality of the medication information associated with treatment plans for specific prescriptions provided by the online platforms. Three trained master medical students independently conducted the evaluation. By securing the consistency of the scoring results among different evaluators and the reliability of the evaluation, we adopted the mean score of the three evaluators for each item to perform further analysis at the item and domain levels, and between two types of online platforms.

Among the 34 online platforms, 2 were evaluated as providing excellent information for retail of paroxetine (1/34, 5.88%), 6 were good (6/34, 17.65%), 25 were fair (25/34, 73.53%), and 1 was poor (1/34, 2.94%). The key identified flaws of the online platforms for providing appropriate information for retail of paroxetine included (1) inadequate provision of medication information, (2) absence of prescription validation and authentication, and (3) lack of professional pharmacy services such as mandatory pharmacist consultations or patient-specific drug counselling.

Consumers face challenges in obtaining comprehensive, accurate and reliable information from the online platforms for common mental health prescription medications. The quality of information provided by the online platforms for retail of prescription medicines is generally suboptimal, and the compliance of prescription validation and authentication is problematic. These highlight the need for strengthening the supervision of the online platforms with novel approaches along with their rapid developments, and ensuring appropriate online information provided to consumers.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12911-026-03386-4.

Figures