HealthContentAdvisors

A Bitter Pill

• Posted November 19th 2008
• by Russell

Prescription data aggregators IMS Health and Verispan were handed a setback yesterday when a federal court rejected their efforts to overturn a New Hampshire law prohibiting the sale of data showing what physicians were prescribing what drugs. This is potentially very bad news for these companies and the pharmaceutical industry if other states follow New Hampshire’s lead. The reason for this is that the pharmaceutical industry depends heavily on these data to manage its large and expensive physician detailing operations, and many of its other professional marketing activities as well.

Interestingly, this New Hampshire law has nothing to do with patient privacy. Prescription data have been de-identified for many, many years. New Hampshire is in effect upping the ante by now creating a requirement for privacy around physicians and their prescribing patterns. The rationale for the law is that this information gives a powerful tool to pharmas to push up drug sales, presumably resulting in higher drug costs. If you find that reasoning a tad tortured, we would tend to agree.

Since 2006, the American Medical Association has maintained an opt-out registry allowing individual doctors to restrict the sale of their prescribing data. Couple this registry with this court decision, and the existence of a similar law in Maine, and a pending law in Vermont, and a worrisome pattern starts to emerge. The pharma industry will hardly collapse without access to physician-level prescribing data, but it does have the potential to up-end established and highly effective industry marketing practices.