Drugmakers To Access Patient Data For $50,000 To $200,000 Per Search
Some individuals have found that you can get paid to participate in drug testing trials, but drug makers are having difficulty finding qualified candidates quickly enough. To help resolve this issue, five large pharmaceutical companies (Pfizer, Merck, Roche, Johnson & Johnson, and Bayer HealthCare) have initiated plans to sift through the health data of 13 New York state hospitals at a cost of between $50,000 and $200,000 per search. Named Partnership to Advance Clinical Electronic Research (PACeR), the new program hopes to accelerate the identification and enrollment of volunteers into their drug studies.
While the search cost may sound expensive, the cost of delaying a drug trial can be as high as $1 million a day when not enough volunteer patients to test the drug have been found. This $1 million is just one of the costs. Other costs include shortening the time of the drug's patent protection while giving rival pharmaceutical companies time to catch up with competing drugs.
While Federal law doesn't allow for medical providers, hospitals, and insurers to disclose names, addresses, and Social Security numbers of patients, PACeR will not run afoul of these laws. Drug companies would pay PACeR to search the participating hospitals' records systems and compile a patient list of those who match the drug trial's requirements.
Once the list is created and an acceptable sized group fitting the requirements had been identified, approval would be required from a local ethics board to proceed. Once approved, the hospitals would contact doctors whose patients met the criteria. The doctors and patients would then discuss and decide if the patient wanted to participate in the trial.
If the patient consented to participate, only then would the pharmaceutical company have access to the personal information of the patient. Even with these safeguards, some civil liberties groups are already worrying about possible data breaches and the likelihood that third parties with partial information would be able to connect names to the data.
(Photo courtesy of erix!)
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