Looking beyond the spin of Big Pharma PR. But encouraging gossip. Come in and confide, you know you want to! “I’ll publish right or wrong. Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.”
Email: jackfriday2011(at)hotmail.co.uk
Selling for pharma is one thing and has been going on for years but an even bigger threat for consumers is the sale of this information to companies that resell to insurers, Ingenix and Milleman have been reselling to insurance companies for years and one use is underwriting for policies. As an example if one shows Lipitor on their med list, well guess what, your premiums might be a little bit more. We have lawsuits on that issue too so it somewhat makes the sales to pharma not look quite as bad when you look at the direct impact on higher insurance premiums when this information is sold in this fashion. Ingenix, which is now called OptumInsight is a wholly owned subsidiary of United Healthcare, convenient with a subsidiary that owns a company that sells the data for profits.
Everyone wants a chunk of the profit and marketing today and worse yet for consumers is the credit agency FICO that now is selling analytics software that they state can predict if patients are going to be compliant with taking their medications with using credit scoring and other information to generate a score between 0 and 500.
If one scores 200 or less they are a bad risk, but gee, never mind the fact that this person may have lost their job a while back and is struggling to find new employment, so to me this is bogus and a lot of others feel the same way. In essence with their scoring system if you are not paying your bills you will carry a big risk for getting prescriptions and we all can figure out how the nut case bean counter folks are going to use that data, scary.
In addition, back on topic, the FICO agency might just be buying your prescription data too, and co query this with the credit scores, and bottom line, consumer is screwed one more way with analytics, so the danger of drug companies having this information for sales looks small by comparison to these other factors, but still very much an issue.
FICO is also planning to target drug companies to supply them with this information too and I don't know on that end of sale if it is specific or aggregated data to let the drug reps know how many in a general population are compliant with taking the meds they sell. It just winds around every which way with some very mis-matched analytics today and this is scary.
I wrote it up twice and my first post on the topic was also referenced over at the DailyKos on the credit company FICO and their efforts. In essence, selling this is bad all the way around.
We are not winning this war with privacy so I said enact plan B and tax these folks on their profits they make from selling our data. Walgreens publicly said their data selling business is worth 749 million, big numbers.
The state of Vermont just lost this battle on a judicial judgment and they went for the "speech" ruling in our US constitution which is where they missed the boat as you can read here too that is a prescription going to be considered freedom of speech too? I don't even think our judicial system has enough sense at times and with trying to make decisions on with current day technologies and using some of the wording of our constitution as we are getting some very strange interpretations out there today, especially when judges don't keep up with current mergers and acquisitions of companies and find themselves at times in positions with conflict of interest. It seems they don't pay attention to how acquisitions are affecting healthcare either.
Anyway if we can't get it to stop, let's the heck out of it and start requiring all who sell data to get reseller's license and perhaps that can slow some of it down and eliminate those who don't way to pay a tax on their very profitable data reselling businesses:)
The prescribing data is specifically used by drug companies of all sizes in order to make attempts by such companies to manipulate the prescribers. The data is also used by such drug companies to identify high volume prescribers of certain disease states, as well as high supporters of a particular pharmaceutical company's products. With big pharma in particular, those prescribers identified as high volume prescribers, or high supporters of a drug company's products, are then targeted to receive monetary funds from such drug companies in a variety of different ways. It's creative accounting to stay out of the radar- the ways such health care providers are paid by a representative of a drug company. The representatives of such companies are then rewarded themselves, such as with bonuses or career advancement, by how much such representatives identify and pay specific prescribers, in some way. The data is for dollars.
2 comments:
Selling for pharma is one thing and has been going on for years but an even bigger threat for consumers is the sale of this information to companies that resell to insurers, Ingenix and Milleman have been reselling to insurance companies for years and one use is underwriting for policies. As an example if one shows Lipitor on their med list, well guess what, your premiums might be a little bit more. We have lawsuits on that issue too so it somewhat makes the sales to pharma not look quite as bad when you look at the direct impact on higher insurance premiums when this information is sold in this fashion. Ingenix, which is now called OptumInsight is a wholly owned subsidiary of United Healthcare, convenient with a subsidiary that owns a company that sells the data for profits.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2011/03/walgreens-and-cvs-accused-of-selling.html
Everyone wants a chunk of the profit and marketing today and worse yet for consumers is the credit agency FICO that now is selling analytics software that they state can predict if patients are going to be compliant with taking their medications with using credit scoring and other information to generate a score between 0 and 500.
If one scores 200 or less they are a bad risk, but gee, never mind the fact that this person may have lost their job a while back and is struggling to find new employment, so to me this is bogus and a lot of others feel the same way. In essence with their scoring system if you are not paying your bills you will carry a big risk for getting prescriptions and we all can figure out how the nut case bean counter folks are going to use that data, scary.
In addition, back on topic, the FICO agency might just be buying your prescription data too, and co query this with the credit scores, and bottom line, consumer is screwed one more way with analytics, so the danger of drug companies having this information for sales looks small by comparison to these other factors, but still very much an issue.
FICO is also planning to target drug companies to supply them with this information too and I don't know on that end of sale if it is specific or aggregated data to let the drug reps know how many in a general population are compliant with taking the meds they sell. It just winds around every which way with some very mis-matched analytics today and this is scary.
I wrote it up twice and my first post on the topic was also referenced over at the DailyKos on the credit company FICO and their efforts. In essence, selling this is bad all the way around.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2011/06/fico-analytics-press-release-marketing.html
We are not winning this war with privacy so I said enact plan B and tax these folks on their profits they make from selling our data. Walgreens publicly said their data selling business is worth 749 million, big numbers.
The state of Vermont just lost this battle on a judicial judgment and they went for the "speech" ruling in our US constitution which is where they missed the boat as you can read here too that is a prescription going to be considered freedom of speech too? I don't even think our judicial system has enough sense at times and with trying to make decisions on with current day technologies and using some of the wording of our constitution as we are getting some very strange interpretations out there today, especially when judges don't keep up with current mergers and acquisitions of companies and find themselves at times in positions with conflict of interest. It seems they don't pay attention to how acquisitions are affecting healthcare either.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2011/06/vermont-judicial-ruling-on-selling-data.html
Anyway if we can't get it to stop, let's the heck out of it and start requiring all who sell data to get reseller's license and perhaps that can slow some of it down and eliminate those who don't way to pay a tax on their very profitable data reselling businesses:)
The prescribing data is specifically used by drug companies of all sizes in order to make attempts by such companies to manipulate the prescribers. The data is also used by such drug companies to identify high volume prescribers of certain disease states, as well as high supporters of a particular pharmaceutical company's products. With big pharma in particular, those prescribers identified as high volume prescribers, or high supporters of a drug company's products, are then targeted to receive monetary funds from such drug companies in a variety of different ways. It's creative accounting to stay out of the radar- the ways such health care providers are paid by a representative of a drug company. The representatives of such companies are then rewarded themselves, such as with bonuses or career advancement, by how much such representatives identify and pay specific prescribers, in some way. The data is for dollars.
Post a Comment