Drug Miners

In light of the reading assignment for this week I did a little more research into the topic and found there to be a very recent case on the matter. As we have learned pharmacies sell prescription information to data mining companies who make sense of the information an then sell it on to drug companies and the drug companies in turn use it to sell the public drugs.

Vermont passed a law in 2007 that forbids companies from mining drug prescription records for marketing purposes. The First Circuit Court of Appeals held this law to be constitutional. Vermont won at the Federal Court, but lost at the Appellate level, the court said it violated the First Amendment. The Supreme Court accepted the appeal to this case on January 7 of this year. 

The SCOTUS blog put this issue into plain english:

Plain English Issue: Pharmacies collect data regarding what drugs doctors prescribe to their patients, and make that data publicly available (with patient identifying information redacted) for various uses. Does the First Amendment permit a state to prohibit drug manufacturers from using that data to market drugs to doctors? ( http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/sorrell-v-ims-health-inc/)

Prescription records typically list the name of the doctor and the medications prescribed, these records also include other identifiers such as date of birth, gender and zip code which can be used to re-identify patients. This means that companies can easily search within patients records and obtain deeply private and sensitive information without their consent.  Data mining companies argue that putting limits on the use of drug prescriber information infringes on their rights of commercial free speech. 

The way this case is decided will have an enormous effect on drug companies and data miners. The physicians side is hoping that this information is kept private and arguing that this is a case of medical privacy. The drug companies are arguing that this is a case of commercial speech. The way this case turns out will be really interesting. If the Court views that prescription information is much like medical records and could be protected by HIPAA as medical records are. But if this is public information then it should be allowed to be collected by data mining companies and sold to drug companies.

I feel that a middle of the line solution would be best where some of this information could still be accessed by data miners and sold to drug companies but it would not be so identifiable that information could be used to track an individual. This case will be heard by the Supreme Court  on April 26, 2011 and however this case is decided it will have a huge impact on one of our country's biggest industries.