The American Medical Association (AMA), founded in 1847 and incorporated 1897, is the largest association of physicians and medical students in the United States. The AMA closely tracks the activities of physicians from medical school to death. In the secretive American Medical Association Physician Masterfile Database, the AMA merges all of the information it has ever collected about physicians and the practice-level medical care they provide.
"As a physician, I have no knowledge or control over data about me that is sold in the AMA Physician Masterfile," said Dr. Michael Mendoza, Professor of Medicine, Pritzker School of Medicine, University of Chicago.
The AMA began compiling physician data in 1906—the Physician Masterfile is now more than a century old and includes records for approximately 900,000 physicians, and their patients, about two thirds of whom are not AMA members. Physician records are never removed from the AMA Physician Masterfile, even in the case of a physician’s death.
Practice-level information about physicians and their patient interactions is a lucrative source of money for the AMA. In 2007, sales of the AMA Physician Masterfile brought the AMA an $40 million in revenue. Dr. Robert Musacchio, PhD, the Senior Vice President of Publishing and Business Services for the American Medical Association (AMA), explains how pharmaceutical companies utilize the AMA’s Physician Masterfile database:
"Pharmaceutical corporations take our data as well as data from several dozen other databases and combine them together with information that they receive from pharmacies, and they put together a picture of physicians’ prescribing habits — by zip code, by specialty, by individual physician — and they use it for their planning and marketing purposes."
Protests by the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) at the AMA annual meeting in Chicago in 2007 brought to the forefront the fact that the AMA is selling personal information in its secretive "AMA Physician Masterfile Database" to pharmaceutical companies. Leading the protest was Michael J. Ehlert, MD, President of the American Medical Students Association (AMSA). According to Dr. Ehlert,
"the AMSA feels strongly that the only way pharmaceutical companies could use this data for sales is to target those physicians who are not prescribing ‘enough’ of a particular medicine."
Currently, purchasers of the AMA Physician Masterfile database include pharmaceutical companies, consultants, market research firms, insurance companies, hospitals, medical schools, medical equipment and supply companies, health data brokers, and commercial organizations.
However, as a patient, information about your medical care is automatically included in the American Medical Association’s collection of physicians’ practice-level data. All doctors are automatically enrolled to have their practice-level information recorded, UNLESS the doctor affirmatively acts to opt-out. It is NOT the choice of the patient, but the choice of the doctor as to whether the patient’s information will be sold. Under the AMA data collection regime, patients have to beg doctors to opt-out of sending their private information to the AMA.
This situation is especially troubling because physician awareness of the Physician Data Restriction Program (PDRP) is astonishingly low. The results of a Kaiser Family Foundation research study showed that only 60% of physicians were aware that the American Medical Association is selling their information through the AMA Physician Masterfile Database, but 74% of physicians were opposed to the practice once they were so informed.
Even worse, doctors were less informed about their ability to opt-out of having their practice-level data sold, according to an American Medical Association survey in January 2007, only about 10% to 15% of physicians were aware of the AMA’s Physician Data Restriction Program (PDRP); a second survey in late May showed that physician awareness had increased to 33%. According to Dr. Robert Musacchio, PhD, the AMA’s Senior Vice President of Publishing and Business Services, "Our goal is to have 60% of the physicians aware of the program at the end of 2007 and shoot for 100% by the end of 2008, which is probably an unrealistic goal..."