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Walgreens.com's Pharmacy Gets Top Rating

Non-profit health advocates cite ease of use, quality of health information

September 13, 2007

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A non-profit consumer health project has picked Walgreens.com as the best online pharmacy, citing the quality of its health information and ease of use.

Experts at HealthRatings.org, a joint project of Consumer Reports and the Health Improvement institute, gave Walgreens.com a "very good" rating.

RiteAid's Web site, RiteAid.com, earned a score of "good," while CVS earned a "fair," with raters noting some information quality concerns.

All sites were rated "excellent" on their privacy policies, an important concern for consumers shopping at online drugstores. Two of the three sites rated only "fair" for ease of use. Walgreens rated "very good."

Raters gave all three sites a score of "poor," however, on disclosure of advertising and sponsorship policies, and on policies for correcting wrong, misleading or outdated information.

Even the best-rated site, Walgreens, contained some information on alternative medicine practices that raters deemed questionable at best. Another site displayed similarly questionable information, said the raters, about supplements for sale.

"Consumers should think of online drugstores the same way they think of drugstores you walk into," said Beau Brendler, director of Consumer Reports WebWatch. "You shouldn't be getting all your health information in the store, where product placement, advertising and other persuasions are at work. You might talk to the pharmacist, you've probably done some research, and you've probably had a conversation with your doctor."

Overall, raters did find the three sites to be useful to consumers in enhancing the experience they might have at a walk-in drugstore.

"Because of their market presence, drug stores serve an important community role, not only in fulfilling prescriptions and selling health-related products, but also in serving as a distribution channel for health information," said Dr. Peter Goldschmidt, M.D., president of the Health Improvement Institute.

"With better editorial policies and improved content, they could move from being a useful secondary source of health information to a trusted primary source. All the pharmacy sites we evaluated have a way to go to get there, however -- some a longer way than others."

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