Most of us are aware of massive direct-to-consumer advertising campaigns employed by pharmaceutical manufacturing companies to induce us to use their products. TV, radio, newspaper, magazine and internet advertising are replete with examples. However, you are probably not aware of drug manufacturers’ use of a sophisticated technique called “data mining” to target their marketing efforts to specific doctors who they determine are most likely to be receptive to the pitches of their “salespersons” or “detailers.”

When physicians write prescriptions, you take them to the pharmacy of your choice. Many of those pharmacies sell the information about those prescriptions, which includes the physician’s Drug Enforcement Agency number and the medication prescribed, to the data mining company that compiles the information to sell back to the drug companies. Then the American Medical Association licenses its file of all physicians in the country (the Master file) allowing data mining companies to match up D.E.A. numbers to specific physicians. The Physician Master file includes all doctors in the United States, including the approximately 70 percent of physicians who are not members of the AMA. This data collection and an analysis of the doctors’ prescribing habits is then used by these “detailers” to do what it calls a “targeted promotional intervention” to get doctors to switch from prescribing one drug to another.

The Minnesota Senior Federation opposes the practice as an invasion of the doctor-patient relationship and antithetical to our work with the Consumer Reports’ Best Buy Drugs program.

On March 14, the Minnesota Senate’s health, housing and family securities committee heard Senate File 3699, authored by Sen. John Doll, which would prohibit the use of this information by any one for marketing purposes. The Minnesota Senior Federation was joined in providing support for this legislation by Peter Wyckoff -- representative of the Prescription Drug Project, a national initiative based at Community Catalyst and funded by the Pew Charitable Trust. It is also supported by Dr. Christopher McCoy, a licensed physician and member of the National Physicians Alliance, an organization founded to restore the trust and integrity in the practice of medicine. As you might expect, the opposition was well represented; however our joint effort resulted in the bill’s approval and referral to the judiciary committee.