Your Doctor’s Prescriptions: Not Private
I’ve often idly wondered whether or not drug or insurance companies could tell how many and what kind of prescriptions my doctor orders (not just for me, but for everyone), since that would be an obvious conflict-of-interest, allowing the drug companies to kickback some sort of carrot (e.g. solid gold bars), or the insurance companies to apply some sort of stick (e.g. kicking doctors out of their network) to doctors who were writing the most prescriptions for the newest, fanciest, most highly-profitable drugs.
And while I’m sure that kickbacks would be illegal, or at least, I hope they are, I just wondered if, in the current system, the companies could find out what prescriptions the doctors were actually writing…
And it turns out that not only are doctors’ prescription-writing habits public, but the companies that collect and sell such data just successfully sued to prevent Maine from enacting a law making the data private:
U.S. District Judge John Woodcock concluded that the law, which was scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, would prohibit “the transfer of truthful commercial information” and “violate the free speech guarantee of the First Amendment.”
And from the other direction, our company’s prescription drug provider, MedCo Health, has a clause in their terms of service making it totally OK for them to call your physician and “discuss” your care with him or her, trying to convince them to write a prescription for something cheaper and more generic. You can’t even opt out of this and forbid them from doing it.
Just something to keep in mind when your doctor wants to put you on yet another drug.
(Or for that matter, when he doesn’t want to — let the paranoia blossom like poppies!)
Read the Full Story from the Associated Press on Yahoo:
“Judge overturns Maine law on Rx data”
December 22, 2007
John Blackburn wrote:
The claim that the measure would “prevent the health care community from monitoring the safety of new drugs” implies that your prescriptions are correlated with later treatment, which isn’t hard to believe. But prescribing physicians could just as easily do the correlation themselves and report the results anonymized, bypassing entirely the need to report the prescriptions. A thin excuse.
Posted 22 Dec 2007 at 3:45 pm ¶
Tom Chappell wrote:
It’s sad, because obviously we can’t prevent the insurance companies from knowing what prescriptions the doctors write for the insurance companies’ actual customers. So, there’s pretty much no way to prevent them from kicking doctors off their networks based on that data.
But it still seems horribly wrong to allow them to call up the doctors and strong-arm them about your specific care.
Posted 22 Dec 2007 at 3:49 pm ¶
Bill Standley wrote:
Oy!!!
Posted 26 Dec 2007 at 6:31 pm ¶
Tom Chappell wrote:
Ah, another poppy blooms (and in December, too!)
Posted 26 Dec 2007 at 6:38 pm ¶
Jeff Lorenzini wrote:
And to think that kick-backs are illegal is just laughable. My friend Mike from high school is a drug rep. Those doctors are treated right, man, they get free trips and dinners and all kinds of stuff.
The only thing that’s illegal is to ask the doctor to prescribe a drug for something other than its permitted purpose.
Posted 10 Jan 2008 at 4:48 pm ¶