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BloombergBusinessweek November 9, 2020“Thisincludesstrictprocedurestoensurethatallclinical
decision-making is conducted solely by the providers.” It also
says it’s merely a platform connecting doctors and patients.
Technically, Hims doctors are contractors employed by
separate staffing firms under the name Bailey Health, but
according to company filings, those firms have been run by
Dudum and other Hims employees and seem to operate more
like subsidiaries.
Hims said in its statement that “it is inaccurate to claim that
Bailey and Hims were/are one organization.” It said that the
businesses are affiliated and that Hims provides administra-
tive support, including data, research, and expertise.
It took Bloomberg Businessweek 10 minutes to fill out a
23-question form and obtain a prescription for Addyi. (Hims
says it has stopped selling Addyi because of low demand.)
Businessweek also received a prescription for sertraline, a
generic version of the antidepressant Zoloft that Hims mar-
kets as a treatment for premature ejaculation. The sign-up
process for sertraline included a recommendation to try a
topical spray before the antidepressant, but a Hims doctor
issued the prescription even after Businessweek disclosed that
it hadn’t done so. When Businessweek left the Hims browser
tab open for a while without completing the order, the com-
pany began sending a steady stream of reminder emails with
subject lines like “Bueller? Your doctor is waiting” and “Action
needed: it’ll be quick, we swear!”
Hims said in a statement that the prescription didn’t con-
tradict its policies. “Sertraline can be used as a first treatment
if the provider decides it is appropriate,” the company said.
Most of the medications Hims and similar companies sell
right now are relatively low-risk. People rarely get addicted
to Viagra or die from complications with Rogaine. But every
prescription drug has a measure of risk, one that can spike if
a patient has unreported comorbidities such as a heart con-
dition or diabetes. And if the future of U.S. health care looks
a lot more like Hims, as Dudum is fond of saying, it may be
a future in which doctors no longer stand between drug sell-
ers and patients to make sure people don’t take risks with
treatments they don’t need. “If these companies were mar-
keting opioids,” says Nathan Cortez, an expert on health law
at Southern Methodist University, “probably very few people
would think this was a good idea.”I
n another life, Dudum could have made a living modeling
Hims’s line of over-the-counter skin serums and wrinkle
creams. He’s 32 and glows like someone who’s been regularly
moisturizing for a long, long time. When he was a kid, his two
sisters sometimes forced him to dress up in girls’ clothes—he
was the middle child—but they also helped him learn the secrets
of unguents. At the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton
School, his friends made fun of his fastidiousness and his fancy
French moisturizer. A few years later, after he’d moved to San
Francisco and co-founded the incubator Atomic Labs, they were
texting him for toiletries recs. Some were also starting to lose
their hair and other things, and had trouble talking about it.Dudum credits his siblings with pushing him to develop
Hims, stressing the value of a company that could allay the
anxieties of men like his former dorm-mates and make them
more comfortable dealing with health issues. Long before he
hired a chief medical officer for the fledgling business, Dudum
went to work figuring out the branding. By 2017 he had a web-
site up and running and had established a supply chain for
cheap, generic hair-loss and erection drugs. “Taking care of
yourself doesn’t have to feel like a chore,” an early Hims land-
ing page chirped. The company began selling its generic Viagra
and Rogaine, as well as some moisturizer, in November 2017—
and says it made $1 million in its first week.
Hims drew in prescribing doctors with promises of a casual,
flexible work schedule, with no rushing between exam rooms.
“There’s a lot of physician burnout” in the broader medical
field, says Brian Williams, a Hims prescriber who started in
2017 and today also manages other Hims doctors. “It’s a huge
thing now.” It would be a stretch to call Williams’s schedule
casual—he sees 200 to 300 patients a week through Hims, while
the average American physician examines about 100—but with
short, virtual examinations arranged to fit his schedule, he
says, he’s been better able to balance work and child care.
In 2018, with a fresh round of capital from investors includ-
ing the venture arm of drug distributor McKesson Corp.,
Dudum began pouring money into suggestive ad campaigns
on Facebook, Instagram, TV, and in subway stations and sports
stadiums. Hims eventually added drugs for premature ejacu-
lation, anxiety, and acne, and started pitching some of the lat-
ter products to women, too, along with birth control pills and
Addyi under a sister brand, Hers. In the middle of that year, the
company hired as its vice president for medical affairs Adrian
Rawlinson, a British doctor with experience in telemedicine.
To comply with local laws, Hims set up separate compa-
nies in various states under Bailey Health to contract its doc-
tors. In California, Rawlinson took over as Bailey Health’s
CEO; a Bailey counterpart in another state named Dudum
as its manager. By then, some doctors were already starting
to worry about precautions. A copy of prescribing guidelines
shared with Businessweek urged doctors not to deny a patient
a prescription outright, instead recommending that they refer
the patient to another Hims physician for a second opinion.
One former Hims physician says doctors with low prescribing
rates received messages telling them to pick it up. Hims said
in a statement that the doctors make the ultimate decisions,
that its guidelines are consistent with industry standards, and
that patients with conditions such as diabetes or hypertension
must demonstrate their condition is under control. The com-
pany also said it has never set a prescribing quota for doctors,
but might flag for review a physician who prescribed wildly
less or more often than the average.
“My job is not to push to be a pill factory,” Rawlinson told
doctors during introductory August 2018 conference calls,
recordings of which were later shared with Businessweek.
Having said that, Rawlinson, who also joined Hims’s medical
review board, stressed that the doctors’ priority should be to