Payments reported by the pharmaceutical industry in Ireland from 2015 to 2019: An observational study

Moriarty, Frank; Larkin, James; Fahey, Tom

doi:10.1016/j.healthpol.2021.07.016

Cited by 14 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…A key argument for self-regulation is that companies have a strong incentive to monitor competitors’ compliance and complain about code breaches, ensuring that breaching behavior will be rare and transient. 47 Our results do not support this argument; instead, our study adds to the growing evidence that self-regulation has failed to ensure transparency and compliance throughout the pharmaceutical industry in Europe 26–30,43,44,48–50 and internationally. 21,51 More specifically, our study suggests that the major discretion awarded by EFPIA to countries’ PTAs and then by PTAs to companies, together with inadequate oversight, has allowed disparate transparency practices across the industry.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 88%

Disclosure of Pharmaceutical Industry Funding of Patient Organisations in Nordic Countries: Can Industry Self-Regulation Deliver on its Transparency Promise?

2022

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Pharmaceutical companies regularly fund patient organizations. It is important for patient organizations’ credibility that there be transparency regarding this financial support. In Europe, the pharmaceutical industry promises to deliver transparency through self-regulation, as opposed to legally binding provisions, but self-regulation's effectiveness is contested. We compared the industry's transparency of funding in four Nordic countries that, given their general reputation for high transparency, offered a critical test of self-regulation's ability to deliver on its transparency promise. For 2017–2019, we compared: national rules regarding funding disclosure; disclosure practices as evidenced by the availability, accessibility, and format of company transparency reports; and disclosure data, including payment descriptions and sums. Transparency problems differed in kind and magnitude between countries. In Norway and Finland, unlike in Sweden and Denmark, data on funding were difficult to access and analyze and sometimes seemed incomplete or missing. We explain that a key factor allowing for country differences is the freedom given to a country's pharmaceutical industry trade associations to form self-regulatory rules, provided they do not fall below the weak, European-level minimum requirements. Transparency could be improved by aligning rules and practices with the FAIR data principles: that is, corporate disclosures should be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 88%

Disclosure of Pharmaceutical Industry Funding of Patient Organisations in Nordic Countries: Can Industry Self-Regulation Deliver on its Transparency Promise?

2022

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“…4 6 Finally, one country, the Netherlands, has been identified as using a combination of self and public regulation, with the disclosure regulations developed with government's input, but lacking a legal basis and enforced via self-regulation. 4 The scrutiny of European payment data has been limited, except for case studies of payment distribution in the UK, 21 24 Germany 26 and Ireland, 27 and a comparative analysis of payments shares not disclosed by recipients in the UK, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, Ireland and Spain. 28 However, France is the sole country where relationships between payments and prescribing have been investigated.…”

Section: Strengths and Limitations Of This Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Accessibility and quality of drug company disclosures of payments to healthcare professionals and organisations in 37 countries: a European policy review

et al. 2021

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ObjectivesTo examine the accessibility and quality of drug company payment data in Europe.DesignComparative policy review of payment data in countries with different regulatory approaches to disclosure.Setting37 European countries.ParticipantsEuropean Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, its trade group and their drug company members; eurosfordocs.eu, an independent database integrating payments disclosed by companies and trade groups; regulatory bodies overseeing payment disclosure.Main outcome measuresRegulatory approaches to disclosure (self-regulation, public regulation, combination of the two); data accessibility (format, structure, searchability, customisable summary statistics, downloadability) and quality (spectrum of disclosed characteristics, payment aggregation, inclusion of taxes, recipient or donor identifiers).ResultsOf 30 countries with self-regulation, five had centralised databases, with Disclosure UK displaying the highest accessibility and quality. In 23 of the remaining countries with self-regulation and available data, disclosures were published in the portable document format (PDF) on individual company websites, preventing the public from understanding payment patterns. Eurosfordocs.eu had greater accessibility than any industry-run database, but the match between the value of payments integrated in eurosfordocs.eu and summarised separately by industry in seven countries ranged between 56% and 100% depending on country. Eurosfordocs.eu shared quality shortcomings with the underlying industry data, including ambiguities in identifying payments and their recipients. Public regulation was found in 15 countries, used either alone (3), in combination (4) or in parallel with (8) self-regulation. Of these countries, 13 established centralised databases with widely ranging accessibility and quality, and sharing some shortcomings with the industry-run databases. The French database, Transparence Santé, had the highest accessibility and quality, exceeding that of Disclosure UK.ConclusionsThe accessibility and quality of payment data disclosed in European countries are typically low, hindering investigation of financial conflicts of interest. Some improvements are straightforward but reaching the standards characterising the widely researched US Open Payments database requires major regulatory change.

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“…With few exceptions [ 26 ], research to-date has utilised single-case studies to examine the strengths and weaknesses of public regulation in the US [ 23 , 27 , 28 ] and France [ 29 ]; and self-regulation in the UK [ 30 – 32 ], Germany [ 10 , 33 ], Ireland [ 34 ], Australia [ 18 , 35 – 37 ], and Japan [ 38 – 44 ]. There have been fewer direct comparisons of countries with public regulation and self-regulation [ 18 , 21 , 22 , 24 , 45 , 46 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

International comparison of pharmaceutical industry payment disclosures in the UK and Japan: implications for self-regulation, public regulation, and transparency

et al. 2023

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Background Self-regulation of payment disclosure by pharmaceutical industry trade groups is a major global approach to increasing transparency of financial relationships between drug companies and healthcare professionals and organisations. Nevertheless, little is known about the relative strengths and weaknesses of self-regulation across countries, especially beyond Europe. To address this gap in research and stimulate international policy learning, we compare the UK and Japan, the likely strongest cases of self-regulation of payment disclosure in Europe and Asia, across three dimensions of transparency: disclosure rules, practices, and data. Results The UK and Japanese self-regulation of payment disclosure had shared as well unique strengths and weaknesses. The UK and Japanese pharmaceutical industry trade groups declared transparency as the primary goal of payment disclosure, without, however, explaining the link between the two. The rules of payment disclosure in each country provided more insight into some payments but not others. Both trade groups did not reveal the recipients of certain payments by default, and the UK trade group also made the disclosure of some payments conditional on recipient consent. Drug company disclosure practices were more transparent in the UK, allowing for greater availability and accessibility of payment data and insight into underreporting or misreporting of payments by companies. Nevertheless, the share of payments made to named recipients was three times higher in Japan than in the UK, indicating higher transparency of disclosure data. Conclusions The UK and Japan performed differently across the three dimensions of transparency, suggesting that any comprehensive analysis of self-regulation of payment disclosure must triangulate analysis of disclosure rules, practices, and data. We found limited evidence to support key claims regarding the strengths of self-regulation, while often finding it inferior to public regulation of payment disclosure. We suggest how the self-regulation of payment disclosure in each country can be enhanced and, in the long run, replaced by public regulation to strengthen the industry’s accountability to the public.

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Payments reported by the pharmaceutical industry in Ireland from 2015 to 2019: An observational study

Cited by 14 publications

References 34 publications

Disclosure of Pharmaceutical Industry Funding of Patient Organisations in Nordic Countries: Can Industry Self-Regulation Deliver on its Transparency Promise?

Disclosure of Pharmaceutical Industry Funding of Patient Organisations in Nordic Countries: Can Industry Self-Regulation Deliver on its Transparency Promise?

Accessibility and quality of drug company disclosures of payments to healthcare professionals and organisations in 37 countries: a European policy review

International comparison of pharmaceutical industry payment disclosures in the UK and Japan: implications for self-regulation, public regulation, and transparency

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