Physician Prescribing Patterns

Pharmaceutical companies have paid over $1 billion to know physician prescribing patterns.

In this Perspective from the New England Journal, the author details that during the past decade, health care information firms have specialized in collecting data about prescription sales from pharmacies and linked it with physician data from the American Medical Association’s Physician Masterfile. Linkage of this data has lead to a lucrative product – physician-specific prescribing patterns. For one firm, sales of these data have generated over $1 billion in revenue from pharmaceutical companies.

The pharmaceutical industry subsequently has armed sales representatives with these data, likely in an effort to increase market share by influencing individual physician prescribing patterns. However, other beneficial uses abound for such data. These include prescribing trends for antibiotics in specific communities, evaluation for drug interactions, and comparing individual physician prescribing patterns to standard-of-care. Since learning of the commercial use of their prescribing data, physicians have become apprehensive about the use of the data. In an attempt to avoid legislation prohibiting the commercial use of the prescribing patterns of individual physicians (such a measure was passed by the New Hampshire legislature earlier in 2006), one of the larger health information firms as agreed with the AMA and the California Medical Association to allow physicians to opt-out of the data collection.

Commentary:

This Perspective article reveals an aspect of medical practice (the commercial use of individual physician prescribing patterns), of which only 77% of physicians are aware, and to which two-thirds of physicians are opposed. This presents an area of concern for policy makers who advocate for expansion of computerized physician order entry and electronic medical records, modalities that will certainly make data collection (and subsequent commercial use) much easier.

NEJM 354; 26:2745-2747.

by

Cedric K. Dark, MD, MPH