Canary In A Data Mine | Doctors, pharma fight over info. sharing
Drugs are big business. And so are data on how doctors prescribe those drugs.
But a proposed state law supported by doctors in the Bay State would ban so-called "data-mining," much to the chagrin to the cottage industry that has sprung up to gather the information.
House bill 1005, sponsored by Rep. Ronald Mariano, a Quincy Democrat, is an effort to stop the data trade.
The now commonplace practice starts with companies buying information from pharmacists. They then combine that information with doctors' records purchased from the American Medical Association. The combined data, which can identify what drugs individual doctors prescribe, is a hot commodity that can be sold to drug marketers, who use it to craft and target their sales pitches.
Some doctors say the ban would offer necessary protections against marketing campaigns that aren't in their patients' best interests, but pharmaceutical industry representatives say it would stifle the free flow of information about new drugs and make things especially difficult for small drug companies with small marketing budgets.
Opponents of the legislation note that doctors can opt out having the AMA share their information, but supporters say it doesn't publicize that option.
They also say the doctors' organization gets a lot of money from selling the data, $44.5 million, or 16 percent of its annual income in 2005.
Dr. Steve Tosi, the chief medical officer at UMass Memorial Medical Center, says most doctors don't like the idea of data mining, if they even know about it.
He said many physicians aren't aware of the practice. When pollsters explain the concept, he said, around 75 percent object to it.
"They feel it's an invasion of their privacy and their ability to act objectively," Tosi said.
New Drugs, New Dangers
But Stephen Mulloney, director of policy and public affairs for the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, said the legislation would make it hard for small biotechnology companies to educate doctors about new products and get information back from them about how the drugs are working in practice.
Doctors are typically very busy and need information from drug companies about new products, he said.
"We believe in a free marketplace of ideas," Mulloney said. "That's what drives our industry. Scientists take discoveries ... and we try to commercialize them. The whole system is based on a free flow of information."
Mulloney said sharing information can also help with monitoring of products to make sure there are no unforeseen problems after they hit the market.
Lisa Kaplan Howe, consumer health policy coordinator for the Boston-based advocacy group Health Care For All, has just the opposite view of the effects the legislation would have on drug safety.
She said the policy change wouldn't affect the use of prescribing data for research.
Instead, she said, it would limit drug companies' ability to push doctors to adopt new drugs, which are generally both less tested and more expensive than alternatives that have been on the market for years.
But for companies that are themselves new, and that only have one or two products on the market, Mulloney maintains that it's crucial to target outreach to the doctors who are most likely to be interested.
"We don't have huge sales forces," he said. "We tend to use that data to identify doctors who are working in certain disease areas."
Still, according to Kaplan Howe, buying information from the data companies isn't cheap either. And she said drug sellers often use the data for more than just tracking down possibly buyers.
They can give a pitch to a doctor and then check his records again to see if it was effective, and that means they can both identify receptive targets for their next pitch and go back to doctors who didn't switch drugs and find out why.
The Joint Committee on Health Care Financing favorably reported the bill on May 21, but it has not yet come up for a House or Senate vote.
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