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Doctors Aren't Being Candid About the Money They Get From Big Pharma

Physicians who get paid extra by pharmaceutical and medical device companies often aren't forthcoming about the money in their research papers, according to a study [open, DOI: 10.1001/jamasurg.2018.2576] [DX] out Wednesday in JAMA Surgery. It found that many of the doctors who receive the most in industry payments only occasionally disclose their potential financial conflicts when publishing relevant research.

[...] In 2013, as part of the Affordable Care Act, the federal government established the Open Payments Database, which tracks reported payments, funding, and ownership stakes the pharmaceutical industry gives to physicians and hospitals. [Mehraneh Jafari of the University of California] and her team pored through the data from 2015, isolating the top 100 doctors who had gotten paid that year by surgical and medical device companies. They then searched through all of those doctors' papers published in 2016, scrutinizing the COI disclosure sections.

The doctors had collectively been paid more than $12 million in 2015, with the median payment coming in at just under $100,000. Of those 100 doctors, 64 published research the next year. About half of the 412 articles published by them concerned research that should have merited a disclosure of the payments, such as from a medical device company whose products were used in the study. But only a third of the 225 papers flagged by Jafari and her team actually did. Worse still, 85 percent of the authors had at least one paper where they failed to list their conflicts.

Despite the findings, Jafari doesn't think it's a matter of sinister intent on the doctors' part. "You can't really blame the physicians—it's the system that's broken," she said. "There's different guidelines from different journals, and it's hard, especially if you're a prolific researcher, to keep track of them."

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