This week, I read a very interesting article about data mining and the pharmaceutical industry. Recently, “A Pfizer-led group plans to buy access to hospital records in New York State to help identify and enroll participants in drug studies”. The process of releasing a new pharmaceutical drug can take up to a billion dollars as well as years to fully test and develop. One of the main reasons why it takes so long is because the pharmaceutical companies cannot find enough patients to do the required testing of the compound being used. One solution which will be implemented this month is to pay hospitals to look through health records of their patients in order to find the appropriate type of person to test the drugs on. 

                5 major drug makers led by Pfizer, are planning to data mine health data of patients from 13 hospitals across New York State to help enroll patients in drug studies. But the deal is not just beneficial to the drug companies by saving time and money, but also to the hospitals supplying the data. It is projected that the participating hospitals could make up to 75 million a year because of the relationship. “This is going to be a game changer, making medicine more of a science and less of an art,” says John Murphy, senior director of clinical analytics for Quintiles Transnational. Federal law prohibits hospitals and medical providers from disclosing personal information pertaining to their patients; such as names addresses and social security numbers. So if a drug company wants to test a new compound or product, they would pay PACeR (Partnership to Advance Clinical electronic Research) to look in the medical records of the participating hospitals, the hospital would them make a  list of patients who meet the requirements the drug makers require. Each medical record would cost between 50,000 and 200,000 dollars.

                Once the drug companies determine the location and number of patients that might qualify, and once it has been approved by a local ethics board, the doctors would contacts their patients and ask for their consent to use the information. This system is designed to protect the patients from having their personal info put into a central data base.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/drugmakers-mine-data-for-trial-patients-11032011.html