Drug Companies Are Selling Your Prescription Information

By John Ballard

If you think Big Brother knows too much about you, take a closer look at your druggist. Naomi Freundlich, posting at Health Beat, spells out enough details to stir the pot. 

Critics see data mining as an invasion of privacy, for both patients and providers. From the provider side, many doctors are unaware that this confidential information is being sold. Ironically, the American Medical Association is a willing participant: the group sells physician profile information to companies like IMS to use in data mining efforts. In one year alone, the AMA profited $44 million in income from the practice (16% of its annual budget).

From the patient side, there is the concern that identifying information isn�t always removed by data mining firms before it is provided to marketers. Evidence of this comes from New Hampshire, where in 2006 the state legislature passed a prescription confidentiality law prohibiting the commercial use of prescribing records where the prescriber or patient is identified....

[...]
�How much is Eli Lilly paying CVS Caremark to perpetrate this deception? Which executive at CVS became so overcome with greed that he or she approached Eli Lilly about this joint venture? Has CVS Caremark informed its patients that it is selling their pharmacy information to a drug company?�

John Russell, a reporter for the Indianapolis Star decided to answer these questions and more this week in his investigative piece, �Lilly pays CVS Caremark to try to get doctors to prescribe Cymbalta.�
What he found out is that CVS Caremark is selling its services to other drug companies too. How much money the company is making on the venture is not public, but physicians around the country are reporting that they too are receiving mailings from CVS �that appear to look like important patient information but turn out to be promotions for Lilly, Merck, AstraZeneca, Bayer and other pharmaceutical companies,� according to Russell.

The letters can even refer to particular patients.

�Dr. Matthew Mintz, an internist in Washington, D.C., got a letter last fall from CVS Caremark, telling him he should consider prescribing the diabetes drug Januvia, made by Merck, for one of his patients taking a different medicine. The mailing was sponsored by Merck.

�It's just plain wrong,� Mintz said. �It's an ad disguised as a professional-to-professional communication, using my patients' private data.��

As far as I know nothing in any of the reform legislation addresses this problem directly, although HIPAA  rules have most providers (if not drug companies) bending over backward to protect patient privacy.

When I remember how diligently everyone at the hospital where I worked went to extremes to protect patient privacy it pisses me off to read about stuff like this. We were coached not even to have informal conversations in the restroom about patients in case someone in a stall might overhear. Looking at records without a valid need-to-know was strictly taboo. Like most places, ours had a zero-tolerance policy about guarding patient medical information.

Lisa Lindell, who became a dedicated patient activist following a tragic accident that almost killed her husband, left this comment.

Naomi, I'm sending your blog around the patient safety network and I'm calling for a boycott on CVS/Caremark. I cut up my CVS card and posted pictures on Facebook. That CVS/Caremark is using confidential medical records for purposes other than their intended is shameful, sickening, and downright creepy. They are taking money from the drug companies to harvest data from our sensitive, personal history... they are scumbags. Will patients EVER have any rights?