MSPAlliance - Monday, April 17, 2006 - A new mandate from the American Medical Association allows physicians to restrict access to data about their prescribing behavior, but many pharmaceutical firms have not made the needed changes to IT systems. The AMA mandate, effective July 1, will provide an "opt-out" for physicians that do not want pharmaceutical sales representatives to access their prescribing information.
Pharmaceutical companies usually buy this data, which is routinely used for internal marketing purposes and distributed to sales representatives. Under the new mandate, marketing departments will still have access to the data, but cannot share it with the sales representatives or sales managers. A 2004 AMA poll showed that 27 percent of physicians would "opt-out" under the plan.
Pharmaceutical companies now need to automatically delete physician information in the sales IT system before sales representatives can access the system again. Pharmaceutical sales and compliance managers should contact IT vendors to see if they have an update on relevant system software to solve this problem, upgrade the software if there is no update for your system version, test the system to ensure physician information is unavailable to the sales force and tell the sales representatives about the law.
