Greedy Trial Lawyer
Data-Mining For Greater Drug Profits
Category: Seeing Clearly Now
Data-mining in medical prescriptions surfaces in many ways, not all good.
Seattle pediatrician Rupin Thakkar's first inkling that the pharmaceutical industry was peering over his shoulder and into his prescription pad came in a letter from a drug representative about the generic drops Thakkar prescribes to treat infectious pinkeye.In the letter, the salesperson wrote that Thakkar was causing his patients to miss more days of school than they would if he put them on Vigamox, a more expensive brand-name medicine made by Alcon Laboratories.
"My initial thought was 'How does she know what I'm prescribing?' " Thakkar said. "It feels intrusive. . . . I just feel strongly that medical encounters need to be private."
This is the reaction of one physician cited in a recent Washington Post article.
Doctors, Legislators Resist Drugmakers' Prying Eyes
"We don't like the practice, and we want it to stop," said Jean Silver-Isenstadt, executive director of the National Physicians Alliance, a two-year-old group with 10,000 members, most of them young doctors in training. (Thakkar is on the group's board of directors.) "We think it's a contaminant to the doctor-patient relationship, and it's driving up costs."The American Medical Association, a larger and far more established group, makes millions of dollars each year by helping data-mining companies link prescribing data to individual physicians. It does so by licensing access to the AMA Physician Masterfile, a database containing names, birth dates, educational background, specialties and addresses for more than 800,000 doctors.
After complaints from some members, the AMA last year began allowing doctors to "opt out" and shield their individual prescribing information from salespeople, although drug companies can still get it. So far, 7,476 doctors have opted out, AMA officials said.
Since at least the early 1990s, drug companies have used the data to identify doctors who write the most prescriptions and go after them the way publishers court people who subscribe to lots of magazines. They zero in on physicians who prescribe a competitors' drug and target them with campaigns touting their own products. Salespeople chart the changes in a doctor's prescribing patterns to see whether their visits and offers of free meals and gifts are having the desired effect.
"It's a key weapon in determining how we want to tailor our sales pitch," said Shahram Ahari, a former drug detailer for Eli Lilly who is now a researcher at the University of California at San Francisco's School of Pharmacy. "The programs give them [doctors] a score of 1 to 10 based on how much they write. Once we have that, we know who our primary targets are. We focus our time on the big [prescription] writers -- the 10s, the 9s, and then less so on the 8s and 7s. . . . We're dealing with individual physicians who might give us the biggest dividend for our investment."
Why don't we just allow doctors to be drug company employees who can push pills to patients in a more efficient and profitable way? Each employee doctor could supply the employer drug companies with much more complete patient information than is presently gathered at great expense by data-mining.
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.greedytriallawyer.com/admin/mt-tb.cgi/505