Consumer Group Opposes California Pharmaceutical Marketing Bill as Invasion of Patient Privacy

By Frank D. Russo

The Consumer Federation of California has sent a stinging letter to the Senate Health Committee opposing SB 1096 (Calderon) as an invasion of patient privacy and interference with the doctor-patient privilege. It is scheduled to be heard by the committee on March 12, one week from today.

Here is the letter:

We regret that the Consumer Federation of California must oppose SB 1096 (Calderon).

This bill raises significant privacy and health care concerns for patients. The bill would allow the sharing of a patient’s confidential medical information regarding prescription drugs among a pharmacy, third party corporations and pharmaceutical companies.

SB 1096 would create an exception to California’s Medical Information Act, and allow sharing of confidential patient drug prescription information without a patient’s consent. The bill’s main backer, Adheris Inc., is a subsidiary of inVentiv Health Inc., a drug marketing company. Under SB 1096, drug stores would provide confidential patient prescription information to third party businesses. The third party would prepare mailings to patients that would have the appearance of coming from the pharmacy. These third party marketing corporations would, in turn provide patient information to, and receive payment from, pharmaceutical drug manufacturers to send the mailings, ostensibly to remind patients to take their medications or to renew their prescriptions.

This type of privacy invasion should not occur without the consent of the patient. Under California law, pharmacists counsel patients on prescription drugs at the point of purchase. It would be a simple matter for the pharmacist to ask the patient if he or she wants to opt in to receive reminder notices as part of the counseling.

Drug companies are interested in acquiring every bit of personally identifiable information about patients in order to market their products directly to patients. The bill does not require the third party mailer to remove or encrypt personally identifiable patient information that it shares with the pharmaceutical company.

SB 1096 states that these mailings to patients should be written to ill-defined “evidence based or consensus based practice guidelines” and it specifically identifies patient self-management strategies as a goal of these mailings. The drug companies that write these mailings determine what constitutes a consensus for medical practices, and drug companies define the terms of patient self- management.

Comments

Posted by: Donald Wallace at June 8, 2008 01:24 AM

Get Email Updates

Want the California Progress Report by email? Once a week, we'll send you the latest and greatest headlines.