Capitalizing on transparency
Commercial surveillance and pharmaceutical marketing after the Physician Sunshine Act
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5260520 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Shai Mulinari (0000-0001-8773-9796, Lund University, corresponding author), Piotr Ozieranski (0000-0002-2023-3288, University of Bath) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 9 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2022-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Big Data & Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2053-9517 • E-ISSN: 2053-9517 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/20539517211069631 |
| OpenAlex | W4210931577 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 59 |
How corporations surveil and influence consumers using big data tools is a major area of research and public debate. However, few studies explore it in relation to physicians in the USA, even though they have been surveilled and targeted by the pharmaceutical industry since at least the 1950s. Indeed, in 2010, concerns about the pharmaceutical industry's undue influence led to the passing of the Physician Sunshine Act, a unique piece of transparency legislation that requires companies to report their financial ties to physicians and teaching hospitals in a public database. This article argues that while the Sunshine Act has clearly helped expose important commercial influences on both prescribing and the scale of industry involvement with physicians, it has also, paradoxically, fuelled further commercial surveillance and marketing. The article casts new light on innovative pharmaceutical marketing approaches and the key role of data brokers and analytics companies in the identification, targeting, managing, and surveillance of physicians. We place this analysis within the political economies of the pharmaceutical industry, surveillance-based marketing, and transparency, and argue that policies to promote increased transparency must be tightly tied to policies that impede the commodification and use of transparency data for surveillance and marketing purposes
Advertising · Analytics · Business · Commodification · Computer security · Data science · Economics · Legislation · Pharmaceutical industry · Pharmaceutical marketing · Political science · Politics · Postmarketing surveillance · Public relations · Healthcare cost, quality, practices · Medicine · Pharmaceutical Economics and Policy · Pharmaceutical industry and healthcare · Marketing
Drugs for Life
Corporate Disguises in Medical Science
Data Capitalism
Targeting the American Market for Medicines, ca. 1950s–1970s
Prohibiting or ‘managing’ conflict of interest? A review of policies and procedures in three European drug regulation agencies
Regulating Pharmaceutical Industry Marketing
Datafication, dataism and dataveillance
The limits of transparency
The strategic importance of information policy for the contemporary neoliberal state
The future(s) of open science
The Contract Research Organization and the Commercialization of Scientific Research
Pharmaceutical Industry Support of US Patient Advocacy Organizations
The logic of strategic ignorance
Manipulate to empower
Big Data and surveillance
When data is capital
Divergence and convergence of commercial and scientific priorities in drug development
Pills, Power, People
The sociology of pharmaceuticals
Sociology of pharmaceuticals development and regulation
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2024 (2) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |