A Data Trove Now Guides Drug Company Pitches

The information allows drug makers to know which drugs a doctor is prescribing and how that compares to a colleague across town. They know whether patients are filling their prescriptions — and refilling them on time. They know details of patients’ medical conditions and lab tests, and sometimes even their age, income and ethnic backgrounds.

The result, said one marketing consultant, is what would happen if Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman met up with the data whizzes of Michael Lewis’s “Moneyball.” “There’s a group of geeks, if you will, who are running the numbers and helping the sales guys be much more efficient,” said Chris Wright, managing director of ZS Associates, which conducts such analyses for pharmaceutical companies.

Drug makers say they are putting the information to good use, by helping a doctor improve the chances that their patients take their medications as prescribed, or making sure they are prescribing the right drug to the right patients.

Some doctors, however, expressed discomfort with the idea of sensitive data being used to sell drugs, even though federal law requires that any personally identifiable information be removed. “I think the doctors tend not to be aware of the depths to which they are being analyzed and studied by people trying to sell them drugs and other medical products,” said Dr. Jerry Avorn, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a pioneer of programs for doctors aimed at counteracting the marketing efforts of drug makers. “Almost by definition, a lot of this stuff happens under the radar — there may be a sales pitch, but the doctor may not know that sales pitch is being informed by their own prescribing patterns.”

The research firm IMS Health has tracked information about which drugs doctors prescribe since the 1990s, and over the last decade, the list of available information has expanded to include insurance claims data, which yields a trove of intelligence about patients’ medical diagnoses and insurance coverage. Additional details about patients, including income, education and ethnicity, can also be available.

One company, SDI Health, promises to provide clients with “actionable analysis” by tracking people — on an anonymous basis — as they move through the “patient experience.” That includes, according to their Web site, filling prescriptions at a pharmacy, visiting a doctor, being admitted to the hospital and undergoing lab tests.

“Through our unique and proprietary patient-linking technology, we connect all aspects of a patient’s behavior,” the company’s Web site states. IMS Health acquired SDI in 2011.

“The sales representative theoretically has the ability to understand not only the doctor’s behavior, and which other physicians are key opinion leaders that the doctor listens to, but also the behavior of that doctor’s patients,” said Jerry Maynor, the director of marketing for North America at Cegedim Strategic Data, one of the companies that performs data analyses.

Some said that tracking physicians’ behavior was no different from techniques other industries use to sell products, including following a consumer’s Internet activity. But David Orentlicher, a law professor at Indiana University who writes on medical ethics issues, said the pharmaceutical companies’ use of data has become more invasive. “A lot of the information comes out of the doctor-patient encounter,” he said.

Privacy advocates also pointed to research showing that people in anonymous databases can sometimes be re-identified. “It just seems like it skirts the edge of the laws that do exist,” said Adriane Fugh-Berman, an associate professor at Georgetown University Medical Center who is a critic of pharmaceutical marketing tactics.