With the proliferation of electronic data collection and associated databases, privacy has become one of the hottest topics
today. For telemarketing companies, banks, credit card companies, healthcare providers and others, protecting personal privacy
is not just a growing trend – it's mandatory.
Following this trend, on July 1, 2006, the American Medical Association took a big step toward protecting the privacy of
physicians. The Physician Data Restriction Program allows physicians to choose to withhold their personal prescribing data
from pharmaceutical sales representatives and first-line managers. This program holds uncertain consequences for the pharmaceutical
industry, and specifically for first-line managers and sales representatives. While enrollment remains low, there are signs
that more doctors are joining. It's not too early to think about the challenges that will be posed.
PDRP key facts
Members only
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The PDRP does not forbid the pharmaceutical industry from obtaining and using individual physician prescription data for marketing,
compensation and research. It does, however, limit first-line managers' and sales representatives' ability to view prescribing
data associated with individual physicians who have enrolled in the PDRP, as follows:
- Sales representatives and their managers are still able to view enrolled physicians' prescribing volume quantiled at the therapeutic
class level.
- Sales representatives and their managers are not allowed to access individual physicians' prescription counts, prescription
volume, projected prescription volume, prescription dollar volumes, or prescription market share and percentage, or any type
of change indicators.
- Sales representatives and their managers are forbidden to "reverse engineer" blocked data by, for example, cross-referencing
other reports to determine an enrolled individual physician's actual prescribing volume or to infer an increase or decrease.
- Sales representatives and their managers can view aggregated data or segmented data as long as they are not likely to reveal
blocked data.
Aggregated data include decile information at the therapeutic class level. This means you will be able to if a doctor is
in the top 10% of prescribers of statins – but you won't know if he is a high prescriber of your statin. That information is now blocked. And if there is only one product in a class, decile information will not be allowed
to be released.
New Hampshire legislates
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Segmented data include information that qualitatively or quantitatively categorizes groups of physicians in certain ways.
This comprises, in part, information regarding an enrolled doctor's specialty, practice setting and monthly patient volume.
The use of segmented data is allowed as long as it does not reveal PDRP enrollees' individual data and cannot be cross-referenced
with other reports to determine the prescribing information of an enrolled physician. Under the PDRP, your ability as a sales representative to view the individual prescribing data of PDRP enrollees is minimal.
However, data for physicians who have not enrolled are still available to you. If a significant percentage of your physicians
elect to join the program, the loss of data could have a strong impact on your ability to profile and strategically target
those physicians. If only a small percentage of physicians opt out under the PDRP, your profiling and call activities may
only suffer slightly.
