Pharmaceutical Marketing Research and the Prescribing Physician

15 May 2007 | Volume 146 Issue 10 | Pages 742-748

Surveillance of physicians' prescribing patterns and the accumulation and sale of these data for pharmaceutical marketing are currently the subjects of legislation in several states and action by state and national medical associations. Contrary to common perception, the growth of the health care information organization industry has not been limited to the past decade but has been building slowly over the past 50 years, beginning in the 1940s when growth in the prescription drug market fueled industry interest in understanding and influencing prescribing patterns. The development of this surveillance system was not simply imposed on the medical profession by the pharmaceutical industry but was developed through the interactions of pharmaceutical salesmen, pharmaceutical marketers, academic researchers, individual physicians, and physician organizations. Examination of the role of physicians and physician organizations in the development of prescriber profiling is directly relevant to the contemporary policy debate surrounding this issue.

Author and Article Information

From Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts.

Acknowledgments: The author thanks Laura Carroll at the AMA Archives and Greg Higby and Elaine Stroud at the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy for their assistance with archival materials and Jerry Avorn, Andrew Ellner, Harry M. Marks, Allan M. Brandt, Charles E. Rosenberg, Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, and Deborah Levine for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

Grant Support: Research related to this article was funded by the Whiting Foundation for the Humanities, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy, and a Medical Scholar Training Program Grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Potential Financial Conflicts of Interest: None disclosed.

Requests for Single Reprints: Jeremy A. Greene, MD, PhD, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, 75 Francis Street, Boston, MA 02115.