What are HCPs saying about medicines information content?

Healthcare professionals are under increasing pressure to access reliable medicines information, quickly and in the formats they trust. In this 60-minute masterclass, Datapharm Product Manager Tara Protheroe shared insights from the 2025 electronic medicines compendium (emc) survey of over 600 HCPs, revealing how they are using online resources to support prescribing decisions.

In this recent webinar, hosted by the Life Science Access Academy, Tara highlighted preferences for patient information such as ePILs, and discussed how digital tools, including AI, are shaping the future of medicines information.

In this year’s survey, emc remains the most popular resource for finding health information (72%), compared to the pharma company’s own website (22%) and AI (8%). AI in healthcare brings major opportunities, but also new risks, particularly around the spread of inaccurate or misleading information.

Datapharm are taking a focused, forward‑looking approach to tackling the challenge of misinformation when it comes to AI. This includes undertaking qualitative research to understand how HCPs and patients engage with the technology, optimising the website for both traditional search and AI tools through the introduction of structured content, and evaluating and implementing the tools needed to support effective adaptation to AI.

Over decades, emc has become an insight-driven bridge between Pharma and HCPs. To understand how HCPs really use emc, we drew on the insights from the latest user survey, detailed qualitative interviews and website analytics.

Healthcare professionals typically use emc as a fast, reliable way to check essential medicines information with 76% of Pharmacists in Primary and Secondary care using emc for prescribing decisions. They rely on the site to confirm suitability, side effects and potential interactions, using it alongside other trusted tools. emc is also frequently accessed on mobile devices, sometimes while with a patient or when a shared desktop monitor is in use, making it essential that emc delivers information in a way that is fast to access, easy to navigate and dependable in busy clinical settings.

Patient Information Leaflets (PILs) continue to play an important role in how HCPs share information with patients - research highlights their value, with 7.6 million downloads on emc recorded in 2025. In everyday practice, HCPs frequently signpost patients to PILs or print content directly from emc (medicines.org.uk), either to save time explaining key information or when providing an incomplete pack.

The shift toward more accessible information has made the case for electronic Patient Information Leaflets (ePILs) increasingly pertinent. They are easy to share in person or remotely, and this more dynamic, online format allows patients and carers to revisit accurate information whenever they need it. Datapharm are investing significantly in enhancing ePILs, introducing clearer layouts with tables and images, looking into expanding their application through QR codes, and improving SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to help HCPs and patients find information more quickly and reliably.

Healthcare professionals indicated which new features they would find most valuable, with NICE guidelines for individual medicines (61%), Change Alerts (54%) and Allergens Information (54%) coming out top. These responses give us clear direction on what will deliver the most impact for users, and work is already underway to deliver these high‑priority features 2026

Which new features on emc would be useful to you?

We continue to gather feedback from HCPs and are bringing additional content and features on emc in the coming months. This includes change alerts, Allergens, NICE guidelines and piloting structured ePILs with a select number of pharmaceutical companies for the new era of patient centred information.

If you’d like to speak to our Product research team about upcoming content and features on emc, reach out to Tara at [email protected].