Multinational drug company digital marketing **

An AIDS patient suddenly discovered that the web pages he browsed always showed AIDS drug advertisements. Shortly afterwards, he discovered that advertisements for drugs to treat insomnia have also begun to increase, and at this time he is taking sleeping pills. That's right. Accurate marketing, which is spreading in the mass consumer market, has captured the prescription drug market.

Using a technology called reverse matching, pharmaceutical companies can bypass HIPAA regulations and use consumer's previous medical and health data to accurately market patients. The specific method of operation is that a data agency company (such as IMEX) purchases a large amount of user data from a drug welfare management agency (PBM) or a large pharmaceutical retail chain (such as CVS), and then replaces the patient's name with a numeric code through a specific algorithm. Then collaborate with a website that uses the same software to convert user data. Pharmaceutical companies pay money and require websites to match two types of data. Most consumers in the United States who have bought prescription drugs at pharmacies in recent years have been assigned a permanent digital code. Through this digital code, pharmaceutical companies can identify them and send them customized advertisements.

It sounds uncomfortable, but it has become the standard for many large-scale pharmaceutical companies in digital marketing. Regarding whether this practice violates HIPAA, whether patient information is used for accurate marketing is ethical, the debate continues. But it is interesting to note that the relevant US regulators who are considered to be financially valuable have expressed this: Prior to this we did not know that this happened.

This article reflects on all aspects of the supervision and use of medical health information in the United States from a very good perspective, and it is highly recommended that there be empty reading of the full text.

A long time ago, there was a tacit understanding between the pharmacist and the patient that no matter what drugs you buy, drugs and personal information should be kept confidential.

However, this tacit agreement no longer exists. Pharmaceutical companies and network companies are quietly collaborating to link US pharmacy sales records with users’ online accounts. As a result, they can select appropriate groups for advertising based on their health status and prescription drug purchase records.

In the lesser-known process of electronically recording drug purchases, a third-party company will assign a unique digital code to a patient's prescription drug record, and another professional website will track its registered users based on this digital code. . Simply by associating the data in these two databases, the pharmaceutical company can identify those users who use special drugs without knowing the patient's name, and then deliver customized web advertisements to them.

The pharmaceutical industry has invested $1 trillion in digital marketing, and this approach has become a basic marketing tool for them. The pharmaceutical industry stated that its technology is in compliance with relevant federal medical privacy laws because the name of the patient is always hidden. However, critics believe that doing so breaks the confidentiality.

The Center for Digital Democracy, a Washington privacy and privacy group whose executive director Jeff Chester said: “This is unreasonable. People buy medicine is a kind of height. Privacy and sensitive decisions that such information should be protected.”

HIPAA supervised blind spot

After interviewing more than 60 industry executives, regulators, and privacy advocates, Bloomberg believes that the widespread use of this type of technology is a wake-up call for us – technological advances are destroying the federal medical privacy law, that is, “health insurance and The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) provides us with various types of protection. Websites and data companies exist and walk in the legal blind spot because HIPAA is only applicable to doctors, hospitals, pharmacists, insurance companies and their contractors.

The issue of privacy is very important to the medical community. As early as the ancient Greek period, the Hippocratic oath vows doctors to take an oath, promising that they will keep their secrets and not disclose any information about the patient. The modern pharmaceutical industry also supports and supports this concept: The "International Code of Ethics" of the International Pharmaceutical Federation requires members to "respect and protect the confidentiality of patient information."

Chester and others are worried about a process called "matchback," which represents cutting-edge technology in the medical data analysis industry. McKinsey & Co. forecasts that the industry's output in 2020 will exceed $10 billion.

The reverse matching software works in the following way: By purchasing for drug benefit management companies (such as American Express Pharmaceuticals and CVS Health Chain Pharmacy), data agency companies (such as Immersion Market Research, one of the largest companies in the industry) Accumulative hundreds of millions of prescription records have been accumulated in the hands. The data agency company algorithmically replaces the patient's name with a numeric code and then collaborates with a website that also uses this software to convert user data. Pharmaceutical companies pay money and require websites to match two types of data. Most of the consumers who bought drugs on the prescriptions in pharmacies in recent years have been assigned a permanent digital code, through which the pharmaceutical company can identify them and send them customized advertisements.

In the eyes of the pharmaceutical industry, reverse matching software can help people find medical information on the Internet, but also can provide pharmaceutical companies with more clear consumer information. Industry executives said that pharmaceutical companies will only share information after matching the aggregate, and then classify consumers and conduct targeted advertising.

Pharmaceutical companies also have modern coupons

The company has over 500 million patient profiles worldwide and their US product manager, Jody Fisher, said: "This process involves the anonymous tracking of patients over a long period of time. Help all stakeholders determine consumer behavior patterns to provide health care services more efficiently."

Reverse matching is one of the major trends in the behavior of pharmacies, hospitals, and other institutions that have access to patient medical information over the past few years. Hospitals screen patients for bad habits (such as smoking and unhealthy eating) by screening credit card records. Hedge funds collect tips for investing in the pharmaceutical industry through “listening” health and health forums. Sales companies identify customers by gathering piecemeal information and will suffer from Patients with specific diseases are compiled into lists to facilitate marketing.

The concept behind reverse matching is not new. For decades, retailers have hired marketing companies to match the names on their sales receipts with consumers who receive promotional coupons, trying to increase the sales of various products by targeted advertising. Now, the combination of the rise of the web and powerful data mining technology has enabled pharmaceutical companies to replicate retailer's tricks.

In addition to Emme, data companies that use reverse matching technology include Symphony Health Solutions in California and Crossix Solutions in New York.

Haren Ghosh, former chief research and analysis officer at Symphony Health Solutions, said people have misunderstood the reverse match technology. And people’s concerns about privacy have slowed down the pace of development of data companies and weakened their ability to provide more valuable services to pharmaceutical companies and patients.

Their goal is to increase the degree of personalization of advertising without knowing the patient's name.

In March of this year, Goshi left Symphony Health Solutions and founded Analytic Mix, a data analysis company. He said: "We are about to enter a new world." In the face of the interview, the spokesman of Symphony Health Solutions did not reply to Bloomberg's email and Phone message.

Co-founder Asaf Evenhaim said Crossix Solutions' reverse match technology is targeted at website users, usually registered users. The company uses multiple layers of anonymous measures to ensure the privacy of the patient's identity.

He said: "There is a difference between matching data and knowing patient identity information. I am very proud of what we are doing and the technology we use."

Will read the mind of the computer

Even so, a Viagra or Prozac prescription is still different from a grocery store receipt. With the development of reverse match technology in the pharmaceutical field, patients are increasingly worried that their medical information will appear online.

Aaron Laxton is a 35 social worker from St. Louis. He was diagnosed with AIDS three years ago. He said: "One thing has legitimacy does not mean that it is morally correct."

Rxston used YouTube to record his life after the diagnosis. He said he wouldn't be surprised to see such advertisements for advertisements of new HIV treatment drugs while browsing the web. Only he worried that pharmaceutical companies would conduct more detailed analysis of themselves based on medical records and then advertise. He said that now he can often see banner ads promoting sleeping pills. Although he has been taking such drugs, he rarely talks or searches online.

“I have an unbelievable feeling: Is this computer reading mind? Many times, computers always pop up ads before I think of a thing.”

Rxston's idea happens to be the pharmaceutical company's philosophy. Reverse Matching solves one of the biggest headaches in the pharmaceutical industry's marketing for years: It removes several barriers (pharmacists, pharmacists, and insurance companies) that have held back past pharmaceutical companies and customers.

Helene Monat, a senior practitioner in the targeted advertising industry, said in an interview: “The reverse match has allowed pharmaceutical companies to find a way to review actual script information and raw data. For them, this is simply a trump card. Kill weapons."

In the past, the pharmaceutical industry has been focusing its work on the issue of selling the best-selling drug patents. Now, they have turned to the embrace of reverse match technology, trying to "capture" new customers. According to the company's data, pharmaceutical companies spent 10% of total consumer marketing last year, reaching $3.72 billion.

Stacy Burch, a spokeswoman for Sanofi, a French pharmaceutical company, said that Sanofi uses reverse match technology to promote the treatment of the three drugs of diabetes: Lantus, Apidra and Auvi-Q. Other drugs that treat systemic allergies. Alyssa Martin, a spokesperson for AstraZeneca in London, said that they use reverse match technology to open digital advertising channels and promote all of their medicines.

Not all pharmaceutical companies recognize this practice. British GlaxoSmithKline has stopped using reverse match technology. The company’s spokesperson Sarah Alspach explained that they feared that doing so would infringe on consumer privacy and that the website did not inform consumers of the situation. She said that the website must "keep the appropriate and reasonable privacy standards" and should also disclose how its own data is used.

Reverse Matching Software promises to bring lucrative advertising contracts to the site. Yahoo and EverydayHealth (the second largest health website in the United States, second only to WebMD) said they have begun using reverse match to attract new investment in pharmaceutical field advertisers, and will also improve their customized advertising.

As long as all parties use the same algorithm, one can achieve a precise match to a so-called de-identification database. Amy and other companies control the coding process used by their own data provider networks.

Regulation becomes ambiguous

Paul Arthur, a professor of digital humanities at the University of Western Sydney, said that we can consider reverse matching of pharmacy data as an “aggressive act,” but this is also the result of decades of personalization of computing experience. Reasonable extension. In fact, many consumers are very much in favor of the development trend of personalization of computing experience.

Arthur said: "We now have a much higher degree of tolerance for supervision, and sometimes even feel congratulated for this."

Federal regulators stated that they did not know about reverse match until Bloomberg contacted them.

The Civil Rights Office under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for overseeing the implementation of privacy laws in the health care field. Their press spokesman, Rachel Seeger, said that because they did not understand the reverse match, they refused to comment on the situation reported in this article. Peder Magee, senior attorney in the Department of Privacy and Identity Protection at the Federal Trade Commission, said that companies that use reverse match technology may violate relevant privacy protections if consumers are not informed that their data is being used for this purpose. The provisions of the law.

Suzanne Philion, a spokeswoman for Sunnyvale, Calif., said that starting in 2011, Yahoo, the nation’s largest portal, began to use the company’s services for reverse matching to register for possible illnesses. Users serve targeted ads. Bill Drummy, founder and CEO of advertising company, has cooperated with both Yahoo and Emmez. He said that about 100 million consumers have kept information records in the databases of the two companies. Both Yahoo and Mamet declined to comment on this figure.

In an e-mail statement, Film said: “These ads are not targeted at individual users. When targeted advertising is performed, we exclude certain types of sensitive medical information. Therefore, all advertising and ad-targeting processes are fully compliant with HIPAA. Provisions."

Film also stated that Yahoo does not accept independent individual prescription records and only uses comprehensive data. Their advertisements are all directed to people in areas with high prevalence of specific diseases.

In 2012, the Everyday Health website reverse-matched a portion of its 65 million registered users, and it turned out that a large number of users (up to 8 per 10,000 people) had seen drugs on the site after they had seen advertisements on the site.

For websites, the reverse match is worth the price. This technology can bring far more than simply attracting new advertisers, because the website can prove which targeted advertisement allows consumers to eventually purchase prescription drugs.

Jim Curtis, chief revenue officer at Remedy Health Media, said that websites that do not use reverse match technology are at risk of being eliminated. Their company uses this technology to ensure that pharmaceutical advertisers who invest more than $250,000 will not leave.

Curtis said that some customers will require them to use reverse matching during the negotiation phase. "This technology was once a revolutionary product and has now become a necessity for the website."

Consumers are destined to become prey

Pharmaceutical companies pay for Web sites to deliver targeted advertising. In digital advertising campaigns, the use of reverse matching technology can increase the website's fee standard by $100,000. This input is worthwhile because reverse matching can provide extraordinary insights for pharmaceutical companies and websites.

Delmi said that the brand website records the activities of visiting potential customers and analyzes them later using reverse matching. About 12%-25% of these people buy prescription drugs because they see advertisements.

With the general understanding of this technology, drug makers face a challenge: how to persuade consumers and patients to reverse match is a legal act, and the security code of this technology will not be cracked.

Joe Turow, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania, said: "Pharmaceutical companies are using the concept of anonymity to fool consumers. In fact, anonymity is now a euphemism for tracking someone's data."

Recently, some companies' nonsense has exacerbated people's concerns. Epic Marketplace, a New York-based advertising company, was recently exposed because of the use of Web browser vulnerabilities to collect Internet users' search for health problems. At present, the company's website is offline and we can't find their work phone number.

Health clinics in Illinois and Australia have recently been hacked. Hackers encrypted all electronic medical records and demanded ransoms. In Utah, USA, someone stole a data from a government server that contained medical information for 780,000 patients.

Misfortunes do not exist alone, and some states in the United States sell patient records that are routinely shared by hospitals. After the format of these records is broken, people can re-identify the patient's identity and illness.

Critics point out that previous series of events taught us such a lesson: Regardless of the custodian of data, no matter what kind of confidential format the data adopts, long-term tracking behavior will endanger privacy.

Jim Pyles is a lawyer in the health field of a law firm in Washington, DC, and an expert in the field of medical privacy. He said: "Whether you associate my information with a name or a number, my information always belongs to me. Reverse matching is like waiting for a thirsty animal to appear on the puddle and then starting to attack. This is really a very low-level behavior."