AMA: Follow The High-Prescribing Leader
2 CommentsBy Ed Silverman // May 22nd, 2007 // 4:24 pm
In this age of controversy over data mining and influencing doctor prescribing, here’s a new way for docs to look over their shoulders and see who’s prescribing what:
The American Medical Association has a new online ’self-assessment tool’ that displays prescribing patterns and ‘evidence-based guidelines.’ Called AMA Therapeutic Insights, the web site is supposed to ‘help enhance clinical practices and improve patient care.’
The pitch: Docs will have “unprecedented” access state and national comparisons showing which drugs are prescribed by their peers for specific medical conditions. The idea: “improve health care quality by helping docs align their prescribing behavior with emerging advances in scientific knowledge.”
“The goal of the project is to improve the quality of patient care by increasing physicians’ knowledge of the latest scientific evidence on the use of drug therapies, as well as providing insights into physician prescribing patterns,†says AMA chair-elect Ed Langston, who says docs can ’self-assess’ their prescribing practices. “This is the first time this type of transparent data sharing has been offered to physicians.â€
The AMA says it’s collaborating with ‘recognized disease experts, national data providers and medical specialty groups to incorporate unique drug therapy information, disease prevalence and practice guidelines into an educational delivery format’. The prescribing data is provided by IMS Health and doesn’t violate patient privacy laws, the AMA maintains.
The idea is to steer docs toward drugs that are, presumably, better because the evidence suggests so. And by looking at what others are doing, a doc may be more inclined to take a look. That can be a good thing.
Then again, maybe all that prescribing a doc notices is due to aggressive industry promotion? Might not someone at a drugmaker find a way to goose this system in hopes that docs start playing follow the high-prescribing leaders?
Further reading….
The Washington Post;
AMA Therapeutic Insights.[tags]American Medical Association, Data Mining[/tags]
Melody
My Mom taught me a long time ago that “just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t necessarily make it right.” But so long as MDs have dual safety nets (they can blame the pharmaceuticals for not disclosing important information; and they can blame “the disease” or the non-compliant patient), don’t hold your breath waiting for the large majority of docs to “do the right thing FOR THEIR PATIENTS.”
"Doc"
If the majority are wrong, that does not make it right.
This all sounds like a lame attempt to justify the manufacturer’s continued collection of prescriber-specific information about what drugs are being used in a drug class. AMA has to justify the millions that they receive from giving physician information to IMS.
Rather than being able to “opt out” of this type of prescriber profiling, data should only be used if physicians “opt-in” by explicitly giving their permission to use the data. Informed consent would require the disclosure all of the uses of this information. If the uses change, then re-opting in should be required.