US Circuit split on use of prescribing data: Supreme Court review next?
This article was originally published in Scrip
Executive Summary
A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit struck down a Vermont law restricting aggregators from selling their information about physicians' prescribing patterns to drug manufacturers, saying it unconstitutionally restricts commercial speech. The law was challenged by three healthcare research firms – IMS Health, the analytics firm SDI, Wolters Kluwer Health – and the PhRMA trade group (whose members use the data), which argued that the Vermont law – which banned the use of prescriber data for marketing unless the doctor consented - would hurt public access to healthcare information and violated commercial speech.