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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15608

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

O'Reilly KB
Court upholds Vermont law on prescribing data privacy
American Medical News 2009 May 11
http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2009/05/11/prsb0511.htm


Abstract:

Health data firms’ argument that selling prescribing data is protected commercial speech gets defeated.


Full text:

A federal court in April upheld a 2007 Vermont law that lets physicians choose whether to allow their prescribing data to be sold for use in pharmaceutical marketing.

The decision came on the heels of a November 2008 court ruling that upheld New Hampshire’s ban on selling prescribers’ information for commercial uses. This reversed a district court ruling that the ban violated First Amendment protections for commercial speech.

Pharmaceutical sales representatives, also called detailers, use prescribing data to tailor their discussions with physicians and other prescribers. In his opinion upholding the Vermont law, U.S. District Judge J. Garvan Murtha wrote that the state had demonstrated that detailing “encourages doctors to prescribe newer, more expensive and potentially more dangerous drugs instead of adhering to evidence-based treatment guidelines.”
The plaintiffs in the case — medical data firms IMS Health, SDI and Wolters Kluwer Health — said in a statement that they are reviewing their legal options. They already have petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their arguments in the New Hampshire case, IMS v. Ayotte.

“The key to improving health care quality, and reducing costs and variability in treatment, is access to more information — not less,” the companies’ statement said.

Maine is the only other state with a prescribing data law. It allows physicians to opt out of having their prescribing data sold to health information firms and drugmakers. The Maine Medical Assn. opposed the law, while the medical societies in New Hampshire and Vermont supported their states’ prescribing data measures. Lawmakers in Connecticut and Massachusetts are considering similar proposals.

The American Medical Association opposes state legislation that would ban the sale of prescribing data for commercial use. The AMA has said profits from such sales help subsidize the use of data in the development of clinical practice guidelines, prescription monitoring programs, safety studies and disease management programs.

Physicians can keep their data away from drug reps and their direct supervisors by enrolling in the AMA’s Physician Data Restriction Program (www.ama-assn.org/go/prescribingdata). About 22,000 doctors have signed up since the program was introduced in 2006.

 

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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