Compounding Pharmacies, Telehealth Companies, and the Duty to Inform
- by: Tamar Sekayan |
February 18, 2026 - Categories:
Over the past several years, prominent entry points into care for patients seeking treatment for chronic conditions, particularly obesity and its related comorbidities, are compounding pharmacies and telehealth platforms.
For many, these channels are not peripheral to the healthcare system: they are the system. Along with this shift comes an underappreciated responsibility: the duty to provide accurate and ethical health information in the far-flung places where patients are actually making decisions.
Traditionally, the obligation to ensure “fair and balanced” information has rested squarely with pharmaceutical manufacturers. But the modern patient experience no longer begins or ends in a physician’s office. It unfolds across social media, influencer content, online communities, and telehealth encounters that often blur the lines between education, promotion, and convenience. As the ecosystem evolves, so too must our definition of responsibility.
Meeting Patients Where They Are
Patients today are active researchers. Not because they are suddenly more curious, but because of a fragmented healthcare system, the lack of insurance, being unaware of PAGs, a growing swarm of misinformation—the list goes on. They turn to Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and disease-focused communities long before a prescription is written.
Industry has a responsibility not only to educate patients, but to do so in those spaces, and to ensure that the partners helping them reach patients are equipped to deliver accurate, ethical, and transparent information.
The digitally native intermediaries occupying these spaces—telehealth platforms, influencers, and certain online communities—operate with incentives, oversight, and accountability that can be difficult to assess.
This is where patient advocacy becomes essential. Advocacy organizations serve as trusted intermediaries, translating complex medical information into patient-relevant language. Areas such as obesity, where relatively few organizations are focused exclusively on the condition itself, require more attention.
Instead, patients are often reached indirectly through diabetes, cardiovascular, or metabolic disease groups: communities that may not see obesity as their primary mission but are nonetheless engaging these patients every day.
That reality places added responsibility on industry and advocacy leaders alike.
The Right Partners Are Important
As telehealth companies, compounding pharmacies, influencers, and KOLs increasingly shape patient understanding, ethical engagement cannot be assumed. The partners selected by industry, in other words, matter as much as what is being said.
At a minimum, partners should demonstrate:
- Clear ethics and compliance policies
- Transparency around financial relationships
- A commitment to balanced education, including limitations, risks, and appropriate use
- A willingness to separate patient education from overt promotion
Without these guardrails, the system risks repeating mistakes such as those committed during the opioid crisis, which presents parallels that are difficult to ignore. In that era, prevention, education, and fair-and-balanced messaging were often reactive: Only after the consequences became undeniable did we see widespread efforts around responsible prescribing, safe use, and drug disposal.
There is still time to avoid a similar trajectory here.
Compounding pharmacies or telehealth platforms that prescribe branded medications while benefiting financially could eventually face regulatory scrutiny, reputational risk, or the need for other kinds of damage control. The worst-case scenario is to look elsewhere until a reactive scramble occurs.
The best-case scenario will involve proactive leadership that shapes the narrative before reputational or regulatory pressure intervenes. Pharmaceutical manufacturers and their downstream partners will recognize their responsibility to educate patients and establish ethical guardrails.
To be sure, education alone is not enough. The conversation around obesity treatment remains rife with stigma, but we are beginning to see progress. Recent campaigns have reframed treatment not as a moral failing or shortcut, but as an act of self-management and personal agency, emphasizing that health decisions are private and deserving of respect.
This reframing restores dignity and provides a powerful narrative that patient advocacy can help amplify. Viewed through a proactive, problem-solving lens, this is an opportunity for patient advocates to seize a leadership opportunity. This can be done in countless ways, from many complementary angles. A few ideas include:
- With comms teams, work with closely with those who monitor influencers and equip teams with the appropriate parameters for finding patient influencers
- Enlist partners (PAGs) in combating misinformation by supporting their social media efforts
- Conduct influencer landscape mappings
- Work with medical affairs & KOLs who have social media profiles to help disseminate useful, factual information to a patient audience
- Follow and connect with patients who are doing good work and sharing accurate information and share this information with partners
There are few principles more steadfast than the duty to inform. When industry and advocacy leaders adopt thoughtful, adaptive approaches to this unwavering obligation, we can reduce the likelihood of a reactive, chaotic environment and chart a transparent and ethical path forward.
Tamar Sekayan is Rx4good’s SVP, North America.
Navigating the burgeoning universe of far-flung patient entry points and potential partners is tricky. We’d love to discuss your situation with you. Email Chris Schultz at: chris.schultz@rx4good.com.
