The U.S. Supreme Court said Friday that it would decide whether a state law restricting commercial access to information about prescription drug records violated constitutional free-speech rights.
The justices agreed to review a data mining law adopted in 2007 in Vermont that prevented the sale, transmission or use of prescriber-identifiable information for marketing a prescription drug unless the prescribing doctor consented.
The law was challenged by three companies — IMS Health, Verispan and Source Healthcare Analytics, a unit of Dutch publisher Wolters Kluwer — that collect and sell such data and by a trade group for pharmaceutical manufacturers.