Consumers want to know how much money drug companies spend to try to persuade doctors and hospitals to use their products.
A new database operated by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services shows that, during the last five months of 2013, drug and medical device companies made 4.4 million payments of nearly $3.5 billion to 546,000 physicians and nearly 1,360 teaching hospitals.
The information is being made available as part of the Open Payments program, created by the Affordable Care Act. It includes consulting fees, research grants, travel reimbursements, and other gifts from the health care industry.
Future reports will be published annually and include 12 months of payment data, beginning in June 2015.
Manufacturers submitted data to the agency this summer, and it matched payments to physicians or teaching hospitals. After the data were collected, physicians and teaching hospitals had the opportunity to review payments reported about them and dispute information they thought wasn’t accurate.
During the dispute period, CMS identified payment records that had inconsistent physician information. This information, about 40 percent of the records, isn’t being show temporarily.
After reporting on “Dollars for Doctors” for four years, ProPublica said many health professionals have relationships with industry.
Dollars for Docs now includes 3.4 million payments since 2009, totaling more than $4 billion, of which $2.5 billion was for research. For 2013, there were 1.2 million payments of nearly $1.4 billion.
See the article “What We’ve Learned From Four Years of Diving Into Dollars for Docs” to find out more about how drug companies try to influence doctors though payments for promotional speaking, consulting, meals, educational items, and research.
ProPublica warns the new government site on industry payments to doctors will be incomplete and maybe misleading – in the beginning.
See the article “What to Be Wary of in the Govt’s New Site Detailing Industry Money to Doc” for details.
