Addressing threats to health care's core values, especially those stemming from concentration and abuse of power - and now larger threats to the democracy needed to advance health and welfare. Advocating for accountability, integrity, transparency, honesty and ethics in leadership and governance of health care.
Pages
▼
Monday, September 17, 2007
BLOGSCAN - More on Prescription Data Mining
On the Carlat Psychiatry Blog, this post reviews how "pharmacy information companies" get data about which physicians prescribed what drugs from pharmacies, combine it with data on physicians from the American Medical Association (AMA), and package the result, which identifies how many prescriptions each doctor wrote for each drug, to pharmaceutical companies. The post features some delightful sarcasm on how the "pharmacy information companies" defend their lucrative work, as increasing "transparency."
As an ex big pharma rep, I never fully believed in the accuracy of this data about doctors, while other reps are clearly dependent on this data, under the illusion that they will really change the doctor's prescribing habits to any notable degree. More importantly, it is not fair to the doctors for pharma to have this data without full acknowledgement from pharma, so I'm a supporter in preventing pharma from having access to this data.
ReplyDelete