Data Mining Debate

Last December, two U.S. senators proposed amending the omnibus Senate health care bill in a way that would effectively ban pharmaceutical drug data mining, the drug company practice of buying prescription records to target and hone their marketing efforts aimed at doctors. By all accounts, these two well-known, well-respected lawmakers—Senators Herb Kohl of Wisconsin and Dick Durbin of Illinois—are both smart and well-meaning. So why go after data mining? Could they, like many others, be somewhat under-informed as to what data mining really is and is not?

For the uninitiated, data mining is not simple statistics. Data mining is a process that takes facts and makes assumptions by extrapolation. In short, statistics are facts. Data mining results are well-informed “maybes”. And one can dislike facts—but how can you outlaw a possibility, an idea or a likelihood. You can’t do it—it’s bad policy, bad business and sets a bad precedent.

So why would someone attempt to ban pharmaceutical drug mining? The reasons could be party politics run slightly amok. Selling information about which doctors prescribe which drugs is big business. IMS Health, one of the big players in the field, just agreed to sell itself for $4 billion. Numbers of that magnitude tend to generate envy, especially when pharmaceutical marketers have a history of donating more to one party than the other. Senators Kohl and Durbin are not in the party that gets the lion’s share of these donations.

Fear and privacy issues could also be a factor. Companies like IMS buy prescriber information from pharmacies, crunch it, mine it and sell it to drug companies, which in turn use it to guide the way they market drugs to individual doctors. But –and this is important—this data identifies doctors, not patients. No privacy rules are broken. And doctors can choose to have their data remain private.

It might also be that Senators Kohl and Durbin don’t know of the good that data mining can provide. Interfering with data mining has the potential to harm patients because this very same information is used by federal agencies to track patient safety.

In my opinion, transparency of data is good and should flow in both directions, ideally electronically. Pharmaceutical companies, physicians and patients all need timely and accurate information on drug effectiveness, side effects and safety. This information should be available online and all doctors should get notification to say where the most current information is located – patients, too. Having the data benefits all. That’s just my opinion. What’s yours? Send me an e-mail at awestmeyer@rmarketing.com or click on the comments link below to share your thoughts.