Who has access to all your personal drug information besides your doctor and pharmacist?

How Big Pharma steals your personal medical data…and gets away with it

You know how they make you stand behind a line when you go to the pharmacy to pick up a drug?

Well, that’s about where your privacy ends.

Once you sign that pharmacy screen and take your drugs, your personal prescription information and your doctor’s name have just turned into gold.

When you go to a big pharmacy like CVS or Walgreen’s to fill an Rx, they aren’t just making money on your prescriptions. They’re also selling all that information you thought was private.

And you won’t believe what group is cashing in on all this.

The good news is we’ve uncovered an easy way to protect your private information.

Getting personal

But first, here’s what’s going on: it’s called “data mining.” And they don’t call it “mining” for nothing.

The biggest of the data mining companies is IMS Health Holdings. And because IMS just made a public stock offering, we now know what your information is worth to them.

How about two billion — as in dollars. And that was just for the first nine months of last year!

IMS, and other health spying companies install an “application” to encrypt your name and address. They then claim they “scrub” that personal information away and only give your file a number. Then they track your prescription drug use.

Scrubbed, really? Hmmm…how would we ever know if it wasn’t?

And even if they do remove your name and other ways to identify you, they could still put it all back together again…any time they want to.

So you’re probably thinking this is just a money-making scheme for Big Pharma. But the group that may benefit the most from this is actually…the American Medical Association.

You see, the AMA manages the physicians “master file.” That file matches an identifying number (deliberately left on your pharmacy data) to any doctor who has ever practiced, or even trained, in the U.S. And all those doctor’s names are available to the highest bidder.

If you think any of our fancy new privacy laws will help here, well, they won’t.

These data miners are now free to sell your entire prescription history to Big Pharma to help with sales. So when a drug salesman pays a call on your doctor, that guy already knows what drugs he gave you, for how long, and if any have been changed.

IMS boasts that it now has “anonymous” medical records for 400 million patients, as well as information on 85 percent of the prescriptions written.

These data miners claim they are doing all this in the “public interest.” That information, they say, can be used for research purposes.

Give me a break! Research?

Sure…but it’s marketing research…not medical.

If the idea of your medical records being sent out to the great unknown makes you cringe, there is one thing you can do. Walk right past CVS and Walgreens and go to your local independent pharmacist.

You might not be able to buy sunglasses or orange juice there, but you’ll get better service. And what you do buy will be no one’s business but your own.

Sources:
“Big Data + Big Pharma = Big Money” Charles Ornstein, ProPublica, 1/10/2014 propublica.org

“Your prescriptions and your privacy” Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, privacyrights.org