The pharmaceutical and datamining lobbyists have been making the rounds of the Northern New England legislatures, offering up legislation to implement some legal "housekeeping" by repealing the laws at issue in IMS v Sorrell, in which the US Supreme Court overturned Vermont's prescription record privacy law. While Vermont and Maine legislators duly enacted these repeals, New Hampshire lived up to its "Live Free or Die" motto and dug in its heels. NH Rep. Cindy Rosenwald, sponsor of the first prescriber privacy law in the country, reported in the NLARx summer meeting that the NH House passed, by a large margin, an amendment to the industry repeal bill that tweaked the NH privacy law by amending the state's HIPAA provisions, retaining a level of privacy protection for this data. The Senate refused to go along, so the entire bill died. Expect New Hampshire legislators to bring this issue back for reconsideration in the next Legislature. Attendees of our summer meeting also heard from Boston University Law Professor Kevin Outterson and Washington College of Law Pharmaceutical Fellow Meredith Jacobs on the legal issues raised by IMS v Sorrell and possible legislative approaches to protect the privacy of patient and provider prescription information, while complying with the First Amendment legal standard established by the Supreme Court.
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