A frightening industry proposal

doi:10.1136/bmj.39241.431875.3A

BMJ 2007;334:1236 (16 June), doi:10.1136/bmj.39241.431875.3A

Letters

Trials and electronic records

A frightening industry proposal

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The National Care Record Service (CRS), if it is ever deployed,certainly offers amazing potential for pharmaceutical research.The whole COX2/NSAID debacle could have been rapidly resolvedby access to the complete prescription records of 55 millionpeople.

But this article sent shudders down my spine about how the Associationof the British Pharmaceutical Industry would like to use theservice.¹ Dr Barker is quoted as saying it would allow drugcompanies to easily identify patients fitting a trial's inclusionand exclusion criteria.

Not using anonymised data, it wouldn't. I suppose it might tellyou how many potential candidates there were, but that shouldn'tbe too hard to figure out anyway. Anonymised data use for adverseevents surveillance is one thing; non-anonymised data to identifypotential trial candidates, presumably followed by a directapproach to invite them to join a drug trial, are another matterentirely.

This use is clearly . . . [Full text of this article]

Matthew L Grove, consultant rheumatologist

North Tyneside General Hospital, North Shields NE29 8NH

matthew.grove@nhct.nhs.uk