My home state of New Hampshire was supposed to be the first to protect providers’ prescription patterns from Big Pharma. However, a judge put an end to that and showed us where the judicial loyalties lie:
In yet another slam on the medical profession by the judicial system, a federal judge has declared New Hampshire’s Prescription Restraint Law unconstitutional.The law, which was passed by unanimous vote in the NH legislature and signed into law in 2006, made it illegal to sell or licence prescription data that identifies the prescribing doctor. It did not restrict the use of prescribing information for law enforcement purposes, research purposes, educational purposes, compliance review purposes, or for any non-commercial purpose.
The law was appealed by two data-mining companies, Verispan and IMS Health, whose business is buying and selling physician prescribing information almost exclusively to pharmaceutical companies. They argued that the law restricted their constitutional right to free speech.
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How is this ruling an example of the federal judge being “in bed” with Big Pharma?
Well it seems fairly obvious, doesn’t it?
*just answering one vague question with another.
What is at stake here is not just our privacy but even more critically our patients. Now if a patient goes to a minor pharmacy they don’t normally use, give them no insurance info to fill a prescriptiont they want to keep private, say prozac, which they got from a doc they paid cash and gave no insurance info to, the insurance company may still sweep up the data from the pharmacy and put it in their central data file where it will be and be shared and replicated forevermore.
As a profession we did pharmacies a big favor a couple of generations ago when all but a few gave up office dispensing. Maybe we should go back to that for the sake of personal privacy.
Please keep the terminology straight. “Data mining” is a process of sophisticated statistical analysis, not simple data-gathering. The real threat to individual privacy is the unfettered access to, and sharing of personal data, not statistical analysis.
Right Will. But they are related. Any IT infrastructure that makes possible data-mining also privacy intrusions. The plain truth is that in this world any privacy violation that is profitable and technically possible will and does occur. Most people have no idea that HIPAA makes them legal.
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