To: Biomaven who wrote (14828 ) 12/22/2004 1:06:11 PM From: Sam Citron Read Replies (1) | Respond to Sure the HMOs can manipulate patient prepays to encourage or discourage the use of certain drugs and their bias will always tilt toward generics, but what intrigues me the most about HMOs are the data mines they possess. FDA's Whistleblower-in-Chief, David Graham, has obviously learned to put such data to good use, as shown in the following excerpt.Graham has overcome this problem by using only large samples of data collected by managed-care organizations. When big, controlled clinical trials designed to compare two medicines emerge, the results often resemble what Graham managed with a supposedly less-sensitive study. "You don't have a better standard than that," says Bruce Psaty, a safety researcher at the University of Washington. This technique has allowed Graham to raise the alarm early and often about potentially dangerous drugs. He has rarely cried wolf--most of the medicines he flagged were eventually pulled from the market. Graham can be credited to some degree with the withdrawals of Abbott Laboratories' (nyse: ABT - news - people ) Omniflox, Wyeth's (nyse: WYE - news - people ) Fen-Phen and Redux, Warner-Lambert's Rezulin, the over-the-counter drug PPA and, of course, Merck's (nyse: MRK - news - people ) Vioxx). forbes.com
