Lawmakers in the House Tuesday rejected a proposed repeal of last year's bill restricting "data mining" research by companies into doctors' prescription writing habits. Instead, they voted to tweak the law while leaving its basic structure in place.
[...]
"I don't think it is going to accomplish much," Rep. Tom Koch, R-Barre Town, said of the law passed last year. "You really have to look at your chances of success and what there is to be gained."
Koch proposed an amendment essentially eliminating the data mining restriction from last year's law. Koch's amendment was defeated in a 42-86 roll call vote, and the underlying bill adjusting the law gained initial approval in the House by a voice vote. If the bill wins final approval today it will move on to the Senate.
Unsurprisingly, corporations which specialize in data mining oppose the law:
Companies that specialize in that prescription research have been critical of the law.
"We don't understand why they passed this law in the first place," Randy Frankel, vice president for external affairs for IMS Health, one of a few companies that specialize in gathering and selling prescription-writing data, said recently. "They hastily wrote a bad bill that is now a bad law.
So here's the deal: private entities have absolutely no right to this information whatsoever.
I'm going to tie this back to Pharmacy Fishing, because it does tie in. One of the biggest problems with collecting medical data about people and storing it in a private database is that most of these databases are not particularly secure. This means that if someone does hack in, that data security is screwed.
Vermont is no stranger to data loss. In 2006, a Vermont State Colleges laptop was stolen which contained data personal data on thousands of employees and students. I don't remember if this was in the news reports or not, but I know from direct conversation with the VSC Chancellor's office that this data contained bank account numbers and social security numbers.
There need to be tighter restrictions on what data can and can not be collected by agencies and to what purposes they'll be used. Awareness on this issue is seriously lacking across the state and unless we start addressing privacy concerns in a serious fashion in a serious way, we're royally screwed.
250-1
55-1
