January 2008
What makes a CR Best Buy Drug?
No, Consumer Reports doesn't test drugs on people in our labs to find out how well they work. We use research reports from the experts at the
Drug Effectiveness Review Project (DERP), whose headquarters are at the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. The
program is funded by 13 states to help them wisely spend their Medicaid dollars.
DERP assigns teams of physicians at university-based research centers to examine hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of studies of classes of highly prescribed medicines. When a final DERP report, often hundreds of pages long, is issued, Consumer Reports Best Buy Drugs translates the findings into easy-to-understand language, adds cost data, and chooses Best Buys for the category.
To be named a CR Best Buy Drug, a drug must be as effective and safe as others in its class and be available at a lower cost. Often generic rather than brand-name drugs are the CR Best Buy Drugs. But if the evidence shows a brand-name drug is superior to lower-cost drugs in effectiveness or safety, it will be deemed the CR Best Buy Drug regardless of price.
Reports covering 35 medical conditions, along with two-page summaries in English and in Spanish, are available free of charge at www.ConsumerReportsBestBuyDrugs.org. CR Best Buy Drugs is supported by Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, with substantial grant funding from the Engelberg Foundation and the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health.
DERP assigns teams of physicians at university-based research centers to examine hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of studies of classes of highly prescribed medicines. When a final DERP report, often hundreds of pages long, is issued, Consumer Reports Best Buy Drugs translates the findings into easy-to-understand language, adds cost data, and chooses Best Buys for the category.
To be named a CR Best Buy Drug, a drug must be as effective and safe as others in its class and be available at a lower cost. Often generic rather than brand-name drugs are the CR Best Buy Drugs. But if the evidence shows a brand-name drug is superior to lower-cost drugs in effectiveness or safety, it will be deemed the CR Best Buy Drug regardless of price.
Reports covering 35 medical conditions, along with two-page summaries in English and in Spanish, are available free of charge at www.ConsumerReportsBestBuyDrugs.org. CR Best Buy Drugs is supported by Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, with substantial grant funding from the Engelberg Foundation and the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health.
