Pharmacists Beware: Data Mining Unlawful
In recent years, the practice of pharmacies selling data to pharmaceutical companies or their agents has become commonplace. This information, called prescriber-identifiable data, includes which physicians prescribe what drugs, with any identifying patient information deleted first. The two leading purchasers of this data are IMS Health and Verispan. Together they monitor at least one billion prescriptions per year. As many as 51,000 pharmacies in the United States are wired to facilitate "data mining," resulting in revenues to the "data miners" in excess of $2 billion annually. [more...]
|
|
|
