Consumers’ access to information about medicine prices and availability as an enabler of last mile medicine access: A scoping review

Abstract

Information about where medicines are in stock and how much they cost facilitates consumers’ timely access to affordable medicines by enabling price comparisons and the identification of stockists. Our aims were to: (1) Review how consumer access to price and availability information is engaged within the Medicine Access discourse and (2) identify factors associated with the existence of interventions that provide consumers with medicine availability and price information. We conducted two scoping reviews. We reviewed 26 medicine access and pharmaceutical system strengthening frameworks to assess how they conceptualise information access. We then reviewed four interventions that provide consumers with availability and price information to identify the factors associated with these interventions’ existence. We found that in the medical access discourse, information is mainly cast as helpful to entities that ensure medicine access for populations. Information as an enabler of medicine procurement for consumers/households is less emphasised. We then identified the following eight factors that facilitate consumer access to reliable medicine price and availability information: the recognition of a medicine access problem that can be mitigated by consumer access to information; cross-sectoral collaboration; the willingness of medicine sellers to disclose their inventory information; having information quality control measures; appropriate incentives for intervention adoption; enabling legal environments; systems of pooling information; and access to digital information technology infrastructure. We recommend that more theoretical and implementation attention ought to be directed at how medicine price and medicine availability information can empower individual consumers to make sound purchasing decisions.