Pharmaceutical marketing research and the prescribing physician

Surveillance of physicians' prescribing patterns and the accumulation and sale of these data for pharmaceutical marketing are currently the subjects of legislation in several states and action by state and national medical associations. Contrary to common perception, the growth of the health care information organization industry has not been limited to the past decade but has been building slowly over the past 50 years, beginning in the 1940s when growth in the prescription drug market fueled industry interest in understanding and influencing prescribing patterns. The development of this surveillance system was not simply imposed on the medical profession by the pharmaceutical industry but was developed through the interactions of pharmaceutical salesmen, pharmaceutical marketers, academic researchers, individual physicians, and physician organizations. Examination of the role of physicians and physician organizations in the development of prescriber profiling is directly relevant to the contemporary policy debate surrounding this issue.