How drug companies keep tabs on doctors

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Spin DoctoredHow drug companies keep tabs on physicians.By Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne LenzerPosted Tuesday, May 31, 2005, at 3:13 AM PT From Slate.com

 

 

Doctors have long maintained that they are immune to the blandishments of drug companies. The lucrative consulting contracts, fancy meals, trips to exotic locales, free pens, flashlights, coffee mugs, and sticky notepads emblazoned with prescription-drug brand names—none of these are supposed to cloud a physician's clinical judgment. Doctors like to think they decide which treatments to order and which drugs to prescribe because of scientific evidence, not marketing. But the companies think they know otherwise. Last week, five whistle-blowers from government and industry gathered in Washington, D.C., at a meeting sponsored by the online scientific journal PLoS and the Government Accountability Project to discuss the pharmaceutical industry. Among the attendees were Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau, a former drug company representative and independent filmmaker, and an unnamed drug company researcher. They detailed for the group how the companies and the reps know—right down to the pill—whether or not their sales pitches are working and how to improve them. The industry's semi-secret weapon is prescriber reports, weekly lists of every prescription written by each of the 600,000 doctors in the United States. Relatively few physicians know about prescriber

reports, also known as prescriber profiles. But their existence makes it far more difficult to imagine that pharmaceutical marketing has no effect on the doctors it targets.

Prescriber reports became possible in the early 1990s. First, pharmacies began processing insurance claims by computer and peddling the data to the pharmaceutical industry and to clearinghouses, like IMS Health, which then sells information about the drug market. The pharmacy records don't include the names of patients or doctors: They are coded with physician ID numbers, which are issued by the Drug Enforcement Administration so that it can track controlled substances, like morphine. But drug companies and IMS can buy lists that match the DEA numbers to doctors' names from the federal government or the American Medical Association, which earns about $20 million a year selling its "physician master file" database. The master file contains personal and professional information about every doctor in the country, including

their DEA numbers.

 

 

 

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