The Physician Payments Sunshine Act — Two Years of the Open Payments Program

Agrawal, Shantanu; Brown, Douglas

doi:10.1056/nejmp1509103

Cited by 86 publications

(81 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…18 For the second year (2014), algorithms were implemented by the CMS to confirm the physician data with additional sources; as a result, 98.8% of submitted payment information was successfully confirmed. 19 Similar data for 2015 are unknown. Second, not all payments are required to be reported.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of Industrial Compensation to Cardiologists in 2015

Khan

Siddiqi

Fatima

et al. 2017

The American Journal of Cardiology

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The categorization and characterization of pharmaceutical and device manufacturers or group purchasing organization payments to clinicians is an important step toward assessing conflicts of interest and the potential impact of these payments on practice patterns. Payments have not previously been compared among the subspecialties of cardiology. This is a retrospective analysis of the Open Payments database, including all installments and payments made to doctors in the calendar year 2015 by pharmaceutical and device manufacturers or group purchasing organization. Total payments to individual physicians were then aggregated based on specialty, geographic region, and payment type. The Gini Index was further employed to calculate within each specialty to measure income disparity. In 2015, a total of $166,089,335 was paid in 943,744 payments (average $175.00 per payment) to cardiologists, including 23,372 general cardiologists, 7,530 interventional cardiologists, and 2,293 cardiac electro-physiologists. Payments were mal-distributed across the 3 subspecialties of cardiology (p <0.01), with general cardiology receiving the largest number (73.5%) and total payments (62.6%) and cardiac electrophysiologists receiving significantly higher median payments ($1,662 vs $361 for all cardiologists; p <0.01). The Medtronic Company was the largest single payer for all 3 subspecialties. In conclusion, pharmaceutical and device manufacturers or group purchasing organizations continue to make substantial payments to cardiac practitioners with a significant variation in payments made to different cardiology subspecialists. The largest number and total payments are to general cardiologists, whereas the highest median payments are made to cardiac electrophysiologists. The impact of these payments on practice patterns remains to be examined.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of Industrial Compensation to Cardiologists in 2015

Khan

Siddiqi

Fatima

et al. 2017

The American Journal of Cardiology

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“…4 The Open Payments search tool 5 provides this data to the public, with data collection that started August 1, 2013. 3 This data should increase the accuracy of financial COI information compared to the previously reported high rate of COI nondisclosure among physicians.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Industry payments to physician journal editors

Wong

Avalos

Callaham

2017

Preprint

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Objective: To assess industry payments to physician journal editors, and determine how their financial conflict of interest rate compares to all physicians within the specialty.Study Design and Setting: Open Payments is a United States federal program that mandates reporting of medical industry payments to physicians. We performed a retrospective analysis of prospectively collected data, reviewing August 1, 2013 to December 31, 2016 payments using the Open Payments search tool. We collected payments data on "top tier" US-based physician-editors of highly-cited medical journals including 1) total general payments from industry, 2) total "direct" research payments, and 3) associated "indirect" research funding. We compared payments to physician-editors and payments to physicians-by-specialty using existing published data.Results: In 35 journals, 333 (74.5%) of 447 "top tier" editors met inclusion criteria as US-based physician-editors. Of these, 212 (63.7%) received any industry-associated payments in the study period.In an average year during the study period, 141 (42.3%) of physician-editors received any payments directed to themselves (rather than their institutions), 120 (36.0%) received payments >$50; 66 (19.8%) received payments >$5,000 (the threshold designated by the National Institutes of Health as a Significant Financial Interest); and 51 (15.3%) received payments >$10,000. Mean annual payment of "total general payments" was $55,157 (standard deviation 561,885, range 10-10,981,153) with median of $3,512. Median general industry payments to physician-editors were mostly higher compared to all physicians within their specialty.Conclusions: A substantial minority of physician-editors receive direct payments from industry within any given year, though most editors received payment of some kind in the study period. There were significant outliers. More robust and specific editor financial COI declarations may be appropriate given the extent of editors' influences on the medical literature.

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“…The CMS Open Payments database is publically available and searchable. However, the context for the data is not necessarily intuitive or easy to understand 17 . For example,…”

Section: What's Clear?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The website experienced glitches, and physician disputes regarding the accuracy of data resulted in the withholding of as much as one third of the data for the first year 20 . The CMS has described both improvements made and plans for additional improvements to the database to help offset some of the challenges encountered by users 12,17 . At present, the public response to the database has been described as "subdued" 21 .…”

Section: What's Clear?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Two years into the Sunshine Act: synopsis of opportunities, challenges, learnings, and potential implications

Toroser

Pepitone²

2016

Current Medical Research and Opinion

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Responsible transparency helps to promote integrity between industry and researchers and has the potential to increase public trust. As part of its inevitable evolution, the Open Payments database is likely to have opportunities to increase and improve the context around the data that it reports, thus leading to a decrease in the currently encountered confusion and misinterpretation of the data. A major challenge faced by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is to make the data more informative and educational, to allow the Sunshine Act to meet its transparency goals while improving healthcare innovation. ARTICLE HISTORY

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The Physician Payments Sunshine Act — Two Years of the Open Payments Program

Cited by 86 publications

References 1 publication

Evaluation of Industrial Compensation to Cardiologists in 2015

Evaluation of Industrial Compensation to Cardiologists in 2015

Industry payments to physician journal editors

Two years into the Sunshine Act: synopsis of opportunities, challenges, learnings, and potential implications

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