1. Nurses In "Disease Management Programs" Is A Growing Trend
Nurses getting paid by pharmaceutical companies to visit patients is a growing trend with its own
issues.
The critics of the program like Royal College of Nursing brought up the issue of whether the patients'
privacy is violated or not when these "contract nurses" examine the patient charts usually without the
knowledge or the consent of the patients involved. In a recent $80,000 program sponsored by several
big drug companies, for example, the nurses contracted from outside examined patient records for six
months to find out instances of heart disease.
The defenders of the program insist that the nurses are prohibited from sharing such patient
information with the pharmaceuticals and that they abide by that rule.
The practice is not totally unknown in the United States. Pfizer Health Solutions has sponsored
similar "disease-management programs" in Florida, especially for Medicaid and Medicare patients.
Between 2001 and 2005, a group of Pfizer-paid nurses visited tens of thousands of Florida patients
with asthma, diabetes and heart disease or talked to them over the phone. The "contract nurses"
encouraged these patients with chronic illness to eat well, consulted with them on how to exercise
properly and take their medications regularly.
As in all other cases, Pfizer claimed it was rendering the State of Florida an important public health
service by diagnosing chronic problems before they evolved into much more serious and costly
cases. Florida saved money by allowing Pfizer to carry out such programs, the company officials
claimed.
The Sunshine State, in return, seems to have agreed with that sunny assessment since it gave a
"preferred status" to Pfizer drugs for its Medicaid patients.
So it's a delicate symbiotic situation in which the states and governments, on the one hand, and the
pharmaceutical companies, on the other, are trying to come up with a middle-path solution in which
one side would manage to stem the ever-increasing cost of treating chronic diseases while the other
side is guaranteed an inelastic demand for its prescription drugs.
Caught in between are the professional nurses who have to rely more on their innate sense of right
and wrong and their oath "not to do any harm" than anything else.
Given the trend in rising medical care costs and tight state budgets, I think we will see more cases of
similar "disease-management programs" in the United States and more opportunities for RNs to lend
their services for such programs through various professional recruitment companies.
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