The ability of doctors to keep confidential the drugs they prescribe is at the center of a case to be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday.
As The New York Times reports, pharmaceutical companies often tap publicly available data to review a doctor’s track record in prescribing medicines to determine the best way to pitch a product to the physician.
“It’s very powerful data and it’s easy to understand why drug companies want it,” Dr. Norman S. Ward, a general practitioner in Burlington, Vt., told the Times. “If they know the prescribing patterns of physicians, it could be very powerful information in trying to sway their behavior — like, why are you prescribing a lot of my competitor’s drug and not mine?”
But the practice has outraged some doctors, and three New England states –Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire– have led the way in enacting laws curbing the ability of pharmaceutical companies to examine a doctor’s past prescriptions.
The Supreme Court case, Sorrell v. IMS Health, stems from a challenge to Vermont’s law by IMS and two other health data firms, along with Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry trade group. A federal district court initially upheld the state law, but an appellate court reversed the decision in November, paving the way for the Supreme Court case.
The doctor’s preferences are known to drug companies because pharmacies, which are required to maintain records on the prescriptions they fill, can sell the information — if the names of patients and related personal details are extracted — to outside firms known as data brokers or data-mining firms. Those brokers, in turn, aggregate the information so that it can be used in research and marketing.
Drug companies spent $6.3 billion in marketing their products to doctors in 2009, according to IMS. The industry argues that more information about a doctor’s prescription history helps drug companies direct their products to specialists for whom they would be most useful.
Privacy advocates and doctors object to the practice largely because it draws on private health decisions and confidential discussions between doctors and patients.
The Supreme Court’s eventual decision will be watched closely by not only the health care industry, but also other groups. News organizations as well as the National Association of National Advertisers, worried about attempts to limit the availability of information, have filed briefs in support of the data firms. On the other side, the federal government, the attorneys general of many states, the AARP, the New England Journal of Medicine and privacy groups have filed briefs supporting the Vermont law.
