Measure would let drugstores pass prescription information to bulk mailers

When you take a prescription drug, that's between you, your doctor and your pharmacist. No one else has a right to know.

Perhaps not for much longer.

Under legislation that quietly passed in the state Senate on May 29 and is making its way through the Assembly, drugstores would be free to share patients' prescription records with companies that specialize in bulk mailings.

Money would change hands along with people's personal data, but, as you'll see, it's not exactly clear who's paying whom.

The ostensible rationale for the data sharing is that it would help consumers by providing letters reminding people to take their medication or refill a prescription.

The reality, critics say, is that this is an effort by pharmaceutical companies to help ensure that patients stick with expensive name-brand drugs and not stray toward cheaper generic alternatives.

They say it also could lead to privacy violations.

"Your private medical information is being transferred from one database to another," said Jerry Flanagan of Santa Monica-based Consumer Watchdog. "Once that genie's out of the bottle, it's very hard to get it back in."

The bill, SB 1096, was written by Sen. Ron Calderon (D-Montebello).

"It's a very good bill," he told me. "It will save lives and save money. My whole thing is to increase the quality and availability of healthcare."

Calderon said his bill has been misunderstood by the public, and particularly by journalists who failed to grasp its finer points. Contrary to some reports, he said, it wouldn't allow drug companies to send you pitches for their medicines in an attempt to get patients to switch from one brand to another.

That's right. The bill clearly states that mailings can involve only "the prescribed course of medical treatment." In other words, the maker of antidepressant Zoloft wouldn't be able to access your records and try to persuade you to switch from Prozac.

On the other hand, SB 1096 is surprisingly murky when it comes to who is supposed to benefit from the legislation. The bill lists its "source" as Adheris Inc., which describes itself as "the leader in prescription-drug patient behavior modification."

Adheris used to be known as Elensys Care Services Inc. The company changed its name after it came to light in 1998 that CVS and other pharmacies were sending people's personal medical information to Elensys without their permission. A related lawsuit is pending.

As Adheris, the company remains in the business of reminding people to take their meds. But critics such as Consumer Watchdog's Flanagan say Adheris' emphasis is on promoting name-brand drugs and keeping patients loyal to specific brands.

Adheris says it sends mailings in all states but California. The company and its ilk have been prevented from doing business here because of the state's medical privacy laws, which are tougher than federal regulations.

Calderon described Adheris as little more than an outsourcing firm that pharmacies can use to handle communications with patients. The way it works, he said, is that a pharmacy pays a fee to Adheris to handle the mailings.

Similarly, Adheris' chief executive, Dan Rubin, said by e-mail that the company "does not pay pharmacies for access to their prescription data."

He and Calderon may be technically correct -- drugstores may indeed be making payments to Adheris. But it looks like Adheris in some cases is handing the money right back, or the money is in fact originating with drug makers.

"The pharmaceutical companies sponsor these programs and [on] some occasions they pay us and we reimburse the chains for their expenses," Adheris' chairman, Mike Evanisko, testified before the Senate Health Committee in March.