Over at the Prescription Access blog of our partners the Prescription Access Litigation project, check out the post: AMA sells your Doctor's info to Big Pharma. It's based on an op-ed column Prescription mining raises millions for doctors' group by Robert Restuccia and Lydia Vaias that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle last month. The blog excerpts the full op-ed. Excerpt from the blog portion:

As the op-ed points out, most doctors aren't even aware that their information is sold -- not just by the AMA, but by pharmacies as well. When one of the 100,000 drug salespeople that blanket the country enters a doctor's office, they know exactly how many prescriptions the doctor has written for their drug and for those of their competitors. And they know how the doctor's prescribing habits changed since their last visit -- so they can figure what messages worked, and didn't work, with that particular doctor.