Drugmakers Mine Data
for Trial Patients
Recently we have been finding that pharmaceutical companies
are spending billions of dollars to bring a new drug to the market. This is
mostly because they cannot find enough patients to do testing on. Drug makers
are recently planning to make a deal with various hospitals to gain information
on how specific drugs work on specific people, this deal is projected to make
the hospitals money, and save the drug makers money “making medicine more of a
science and less of an art”. There are some constraints ethically, and the government
clearly puts restraints on releasing specific data of customers such as social
security numbers. Drug makers are
big potential customers of aggregated health data since drug development times
have more than doubled in the past 20 years without a marked increase in the
percentage of compounds successfully brought to market.
“The bottom line: A group of 13 New York hospitals
will sell access to patient data to drug makers for $50,000 to $200,000 per
search”
Gaining data
like this can be extremely difficult and time consuming. With the new process
being implemented, drug makers are going to be able to save time and money
while gaining data. Doctors and hospitals respect and like the idea because it
makes drug makers more attractive research partners. Although it seems steep
for drug makers to purchase data for up to $200,000 in turn it will actually be
saving them money considering every day delayed can equal up to 1 million
dollars loss for them.
I actually
think this is a good idea from a business standpoint, but ethically it seems a
little insane to sell data from hospitals. I know it is for a good cause, but
the fact that certain patients who have cancer and other illnesses will be reveled
may cause a large uproar for the hospitals. Even if these people want to help
to show data on how the drugs work, they may not want their information revealed.
No comments:
Post a Comment