Patient data for sale

Trade confidential data of millions of patients

08/18/2013

According to a media report, a data center for pharmacies sells badly encrypted patient data to market researchers. In Germany, more than 40 million insured are targeted. For privacy advocates, this is an incredible scandal.

42 million German insured targeted
According to a report in the magazine SPIEGEL, millions of patients and doctors are spied inadmissible in Germany. Patient data would be sold in insufficiently encrypted form from the South German pharmacy computer center VSA in Munich to market research companies. Customers include companies such as the US company IMS Health, which operates in more than 100 countries. The company tracks the diseases of more than 300 million patients, including it „42 million different insured persons“ in Germany. SPIEGEL quotes from an internal paper: „Many patient careers are traceable back to 1992. "

Trade encrypted data legally
The trade in recipe data is basically legal if it is encrypted and used. Even anonymized and encrypted data sets contain information that can be used for market research by pharmaceutical companies. With the recipe data, which are delivered to IMS, the patient identity is however only disguised by a 64-digit code, which simply can be counted back to the actual insurance number, the SPIEGEL citing confidential documents.

Less than 1.5 cents per German record
The drug companies may be able to understand because of the poorly encrypted data, which medications were prescribed by which medical practices. For example, manufacturers could use such information to monitor the work of their sales representatives and determine if their visit to a doctor would result in their being more likely to prescribe medicines from a particular manufacturer. In addition, the gender and age of the patients would be passed on to the market researchers. IMS must pay for each recipe data set of a German insured partly less than 1.5 cents to pharmacy computer centers, the SPIEGEL.

„One of the biggest data scandals of the post-war era“
According to Thilo Weichert, head of the Independent Center for Privacy Protection Schleswig-Holstein, is the trade in recipe information „One of the biggest data scandals of the post-war period. "As early as July, Weichert had pointed out data protection issues in the Deutsche Apotheker-Zeitung when passing on prescription data and also mentioned IMS. According to the company, IGEL had an offer from IMS to the French pharmaceutical group Sanofi Aventis from April 2012, in which IMS for the price of 86.400 euros the information from insulin recipes „individual patient“ and with „twelve months updates“ offering.

Trusted profession pharmacist
The pharmacist warns Weichert to have their data processed by data centers that are aware that patient data is not adequately anonymised. One could evaluate this as a violation of the confidentiality of pharmacies. And at the pharmacy data centers he criticizes, they would argue that more privacy would make their services more expensive: „An illegal business model does not get any better as it should be cheaper and more lucrative. "The data protector also says: „It would be sad if the service providers of the profession of trusting pharmacists were only able to arrange for confidentiality through legal proceedings. "(Ad)

Picture credits: GG-Berlin