I agree very much with Mr. Poston's comments. The issue is how the information is used once it's collected. Aggregate information about how drugs are being used in a community can certainly help people who are planning services in that community, and it can improve the state of health in that community.
What we worry about is when the data becomes nominal, even in terms of naming the physician, if not his patients. For example, if a physician is a high prescriber of HIV-type drugs, it becomes known who his patients are. That can be a potential problem for privacy. As mentioned earlier, it can also leave people open to being targeted for certain high-pressure marketing initiatives.
We would prefer that information be regarded as a subset of personal information, so there can be reasonable balances of the legitimate uses of that information versus these kinds of marketing commercial uses.