Yesterday the Federal Trade Commission proposed a broad framework for protecting consumer privacy both on the Web and off-line. The framework is meant to help guide policymakers in crafting legislation to prevent the tracking and wholesale collection and sale of consumer information that is practiced by large on-line companies like Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft. Yesterday I wrote about health information “data mining;” (see post below) the collection and sale specifically of web-user’s health data, including the conditions they suffer from, medications used and identification information like name, age, gender and even personal doctor. As the FTC notes in its proposal; “The more information that is known about a consumer, the more a company will pay to deliver a precisely-targeted advertisement to him."
Monthly Archives: December 2010
Is “Data Mining” of Prescription and Patient Records Protected By the First Amendment?
A year ago, I wrote about how pharmaceutical companies are increasingly paying third parties like IMS Health or CVS-Caremark to provide them with the prescribing records and identification information for individual doctors. Armed with this information, drug companies—sometimes taking on the role of “concerned experts”—can tailor their marketing directly to these doctors; visiting their offices and sending them letters and informational material suggesting that they use a different (usually newer and more expensive) medication for certain patients or suggest that they adjust dosages.
This practice, called data-mining, is a highly lucrative business (In 2005, data mining provided IMS alone with revenues of $1.75 billion) that is rapidly replacing direct-to-consumer advertising as the preferred form of pharmaceutical marketing. Data miners will have an even easier time amassing the information they sell to companies as more physicians and practices adopt electronic health records. Prescribing information about patients is coming from other sources too: Websites designed to help patients connect with others suffering from the same disease (breast cancer, Parkinson’s disease, fibromyalgia, etc.) have also started selling information about which medications their members use to drug companies. And even the American Medical Association is in on the game; last year the group garnered $44 million in profits by selling physician profile information that data miners like IMS use to blend with prescribing records to help drug companies target individual doctors.