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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday March 08 2017, @10:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the who-knew? dept.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-03/s-wtr030617.php

More than three in every five Americans see a doctor who receives some form of payment from industry. This is according to a new survey led by Genevieve Pham-Kanter of Drexel University's Dornsife School of Public Health in the US. It is the first nationally representative study to examine the prevalence of industry payments among the general population of patients.

[...] The survey was done in light of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which addresses concerns that industry payments could lead physicians to make decisions that are not in the best interest of their patients. Since 2013 the Act requires pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers to report gifts and payments they make to healthcare providers. This information is publicly available on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Open Payments website.

[...] The survey highlighted that 65 percent of respondents had visited a physician who accepted an industry payment. This was particularly the case for those visiting family medicine physicians (63 percent) and obstetricians and gynecologists (77 percent).

The Open Payments website can be found at: https://www.cms.gov/OpenPayments/index.html

References:
Pham-Kanter, G. , Mello, M., Lehmann, L., Campbell, E., Carpenter, D. (2017). Public Awareness of and Contact with Physicians Who Receive Industry Payments: A National Survey, Journal of General Internal Medicine, DOI: 10.1007/s11606-017-4012-3


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @05:11PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @05:11PM (#476536)

    > And, speaking as a physician, they're all bad.

    Thanks for your comments. Your restraint in accepting free lunches is to be commended!

    Since you are on the "front lines", do you have any idea of the "multiplier" or return on investment? By this I mean, what do the drug companies spend on their reps and on lunches, compared to the increase in sales of new/expensive meds? My guess is that it could be cheaper than the return on TV drug advertising because face-to-face communication is usually much more effective.

    This is probably all worked out by the marketing departments of the drug companies, but we will never see that data unless someone gives it to Wikileaks...

  • (Score: 2) by mmcmonster on Wednesday March 08 2017, @05:38PM

    by mmcmonster (401) on Wednesday March 08 2017, @05:38PM (#476562)

    Not sure how to calculate these sort of numbers. But I've had drug reps pay $200 or more to feed an office to get 15 minutes with two physicians. And the same rep will come back to the same office monthly for a year or more to speak to the same docs.

    For instance: I've been dealing with the same rep for an anti-platelet drug, Effient, for a couple years now. About once a month she'd bring my entire office food, just to speak with me and 1-2 of my partners. (I do accept her lunches, but it's because I looked at the studies and actually believe in the added beneficial effects over other generic drugs in the same class, such as clopidogrel and ticlodipine.) She recently told me that she's done with me as the drug is going generic in the fall.