Drug, Device Industries Paid Doctors $6.5 Billion Last Year
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
New data helps uncover intricate relationships between biopharma and healthcare industries.
CMS launched the Open Payments Website as an effort to provide transparency into the relationship between American medicine and the drug and medical device industries. When launched, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said in a statement, “From day one, the Physician Payments Sunshine Act database will be helpful in shining light on a part of medicine most people haven’t had the time or opportunity to consider. Eventually, the database will become a valuable resource for all of us with a stake in our country’s health care system. That includes individual consumers, insurance companies, and taxpayers who pay for Medicare and Medicaid.”
But the Open Payments Website has been plagued with issues since its inception, as Health IT Outcomes reported, causing numerous problems including a glitch that shut down the entire website. Access to the online records was suspended after doctors of the same name noticed they were credited with payments made to the other and, shortly after, CMS announced that one third of records would be withheld at the time of the Open Payments launch.
Other reported issues with the Open Payments site included misspellings, mixed up payments, and missing information. According to ProPublica/New York Times’ “The Upshot”, errors continue to plague the system.
However, things may be looking up with the latest release of data revealing U.S. doctors and teaching hospitals received $6.49 billion from drug and medical-device makers in 2014. The data range from royalties paid to hospitals to help develop products to fees provided to medical experts to speak at a dinner with colleagues. These types of payments are broken down into two major categories: money to fund research and payments to entertain doctors or compensate them for consulting or other non-research purposes.
Bloomberg reports the data includes payments to about 607,000 doctors and 1,121 teaching hospitals. Overall, companies made $3.23 billion in payments for research and $2.56 billion for other purposes, according to a summary posted on the website. The data also include ownership interests of $703 million.
Among the drug companies making the largest payments were Pfizer Inc., with $234 million in research payments and $53.3 million in general outlays; Merck & Co. with $97.7 million for research and $27.5 million in general payments; and AstraZeneca Plc with $85.7 million in research and $72.5 million in general payments.
The Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA asserts that collaboration between doctors and drug makers can improve patient care. As BioPharma Dive reports, some argue that transparency is necessary to reveal the real relationships between pharmaceutical companies and healthcare agencies.