Dominick L. Frosch Ph.D.

Chief Care Delivery Evaluation Officer, Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute
Associate Professor of Medicine
University of California, Los Angeles
Email: dfrosch@mednet.ucla.edu Discipline: Psychology Expertise: Medical Decision-making, Health Communication

Investigator Award

Direct-to-Consumer Advertising: Do Television Pharmaceutical Ads Prompt More Than Just Prescription Requests?
Award Year: 2006 Direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs, permitted only in the United States and New Zealand, has been shown to influence patients' requests for prescriptions from their doctors and to contribute to increased drug utilization and spending. Although the pharmaceutical industry now spends billions each year on this highly controversial form of advertising, little is known about how it actually affects consumer health behaviors and whether those effects are positive, negative or mixed. Co-investigators Dominick L. Frosch, Ph.D. and Jose A. Pagan, Ph.D. explore these questions in their project on Direct-to-Consumer Advertising: Do Television Pharmaceutical Ads Prompt More Than Just Prescription Requests? They also analyze whether television ads affect uninsured consumers differently than insured consumers, who have greater access to physicians and fewer concerns about the costs of medical care. Their study should help policymakers understand how advertising affects consumer health behaviors and inform the debate about whether more regulation of advertising is warranted.

Background

Dominick L. Frosch, Ph.D., is associate professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the chief care delivery evaluation officer at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute, where he helps identify, in a rigorous research-based manner, and implement initiatives that benefit both patients and clinicians. He is also a fellow in the Patient Care Program at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Dr. Frosch trained as a clinical health psychologist at the University of California, San Diego and completed his clinical residency in rehabilitation psychology at the University of Washington. He was a member of the inaugural cohort of the RWJ Health and Society Scholars at the University of Pennsylvania from 2003-2005. Dr. Frosch's research is focused on informed decision making in health and health care. At the clinical level his work focuses on developing and implementing patient interventions to facilitate informed medical decision making. His interests at the population level focus on the effects of health information delivered through mass media on informed decision making and health behaviors. His research has been funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Cancer Institute and the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making. He also serves as Associate Editor for the journal Health Psychology.