The new president of the American Medical Association is lashing out at critics who claim the AMA has not done enough to persuade physicians to join its five-year-old Physician Data Restriction Program, InformationWeek reports. So far, less than 28,000 doc have joined the PDRP, which enables them to opt out of prescription data mining used in pharmaceutical marketing campaigns.

Last week, a commentary in The New England Journal of Medicine commentary suggested the AMA had sabotaged the PDRP. As part of a discussion about the recent US Supreme Court decision to strike down a Vermont data mining law (read here), the authors pointed out that the AMA makes a great deal of money from selling its physician lists, which data miners combine with prescribing data.

“To date, few physicians (approximately 4%) have signed up for the PDRP, perhaps because the AMA’s financial interests cut against strongly promoting the program,” wrote Michelle Mello of the Harvard School of Public Health and Noah Messing of Yale Law School. “The AMA realizes substantial revenue from the sale of physicians’ professional data, and widespread physician opt-out would reduce the usefulness of the data to” data miners, such as IMS Health and Wolters Kluwer.

AMA president Peter Carmel is having none of it. “The American Medical Association has dedicated substantial resources to an ongoing multi-year campaign promoting its program to provide physicians with the choice to designate their prescription data as off-limits to pharmaceutical sales representatives. Assertions that call into question the AMA’s commitment are unfounded speculation that ignores the facts,” he tells InformationWeek.

“To promote the PDRP, the AMA has sent program information to half a million physicians in each of the past three years, has promoted it in numerous medical and specialty journals, and included it regularly in AMA electronic communication channels. Despite national publicity for the PDRP, enrollment in the program has not matched expectations of critics who would rather hurl reckless accusations at the AMA than admit that physician awareness of the PDRP has little impact on enrollment rates.”

The main argument of the NEJM commentary is that state data mining laws that focus on physician privacy might withstand judicial scrutiny better than the Vermont law, which was rejected over commercial speech issues. However, as InformationWeek notes, many docs are not bothered if reps uses prescribing patterns to market new meds.

A Gallup poll conducted before the PDRP launch five years ago found that 84 percent of docs were either unconcerned about the release of prescribing data or would be satisfied if they had the ability to opt out of data mining plans, InformationWeek reminds us. This likely explains the miniscule enrollment in the PDRP. And of course, docs can simply avoid seeing reps altogether if they do not want their prescribing patterns used for marketing purposes.

In fact, a recent survey found that 10 percent of docs no longer see reps and 69 percent say are seeing fewer reps these days, according to Sermo. Nonetheless, the vast majority of docs continue to welcome reps into their offices, which is why Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine passed laws to restrict the use of prescribing data in marketing. The goal was to discourage unnecessary prescribing of drugs that inflated healthcare costs (see more here).

However, the US Supreme Court ruled the Vermont law discriminated against drugmakers and data miners by prohibiting the prescribing data from being used for marketing, but allowing docs to share the info with others. The AMA, Information Week writes, believes docs should be able to protect their privacy by preventing data mining if they choose, but prefers its PDRP to state laws that might be too restrictive.

“The AMA’s PDRP is the nation’s best option for balancing individual physician opinions regarding prescription data with First Amendment freedoms and the fundamental public interest in robust medical research that result from appropriate disclosure of prescriber data,” Carmel argues.

That leaves the states in a curious position, unable to assert that they are defending physicians’ privacy rights or prove that restrictions on data mining for public policy purposes are constitutional.