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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12637

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Koroneos G.
Vermont Amends Data Mining Law
PharmExec.com 2008 Jan 30
http://pharmexec.findpharma.com/pharmexec/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=487083


Full text:

After waging battle for months, Vermont has decided to amend a new law that would ban data mining companies from gathering physician-prescribing information. The announcement comes after similar legislation in New Hampshire and Maine was rebuked in court.

Companies such as IMS Health and Verispan resell the data to pharmaceutical companies and government agencies. According to the three states, the new law would help curb rising healthcare costs, but so far they have had a hard time proving it in court.

Rather than lose the battle, Vermont is modifying the law as follows:

The state will delay the law until September 2008, so that opt-in forms can be sent to physicians with normal licensing forms.
A provision will be deleted that required manufacturers to provide physicians who opted in to the system with evidence-based information about other products in the same therapeutic class.
Minor language changes were suggested to bring a cause if a manufacturer receives a warning letter from FDA.

“They don’t seem to be able to implement the law,” said Randy Frankel, VP external affairs at IMS Health. “They don’t seem to be able to support it in the courts and are obviously trying to adjust to the situation.”

The judges in both the New Hampshire and Maine cases indicated that the data was valuable. One judge indicated that patient care would be compromised and another said that the data is valuable.

“I believe these amendments are intended to bolster their position, although we don’t believe any of the amendments they are suggesting in any way change the outcome,” Frankel said. “These laws are misguided and will cause more harm than good, in respect to patient care. We would welcome a repeal of these laws and would much rather work with [the states] than have to deal with this situation in the court.”

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909