Pfizer Discloses Payments To Doctors
16 CommentsBy Ed Silverman // March 31st, 2010 // 1:44 pm
Pfizer joins a growing list of companies that are disclosing what they pay to physicians for consulting and speaking, as well as meals and other goodies worth more than $25. Pfizer is also reporting payments for clinical trial work. Others that publish various payments include GlaxoSmithKline, Lilly and Merck.
The Pfizer move comes in response, in part, to a Corporate Integrity Agreement reached last year for off-label marketing of various drugs, but also anticipates the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, which was wrapped into the health care reform bill and requires disclosure by drugmakers.
The Pfizer site contains data from July through December 2009 concerning work with about 4,500 healthcare professionals resulting in total payments of $35 million, including payments for meals or ‘non-monetary’ educational items worth $25 or more and totaling $500 or more during that period. About 1,500 healthcare professionals were paid an average of $5,000, and about 2,800 who served as speakers were paid an average of $3,400, according to Pfizer. Both speakers and attendees were also provided meals.
Almost 44 percent of the total went to about 250 research organizations. In total, Pfizer reported payments of approximately $15.3 million to these institutions for all new clinical trials initiated after July 1, 2009 as well as clinical trial payments made between July 1 and December 31, 2009 to academic medical centers for ongoing or new research. These payments cover participant recruitment, coordinating and conducting clinical trials and completing compliance activities.
Pfizer says it will post its next report on March 31, 2011 and include a full year of data for 2010. And that report will be expanded to include the value of all ‘financial interactions including non-monetary items, such as meals and educational things, regardless of value,’ according to Pfizer. The payment report will be posted quarterly beginning in June 2011.
Photo courtesy of Jerome Kassirer
Elaine
Physicians only? What about the PhDs, etc. etc? Looked at Pfizer site and wasn’t sure if only MDs. Need a wide net on transparency.
M Helm, MD
The website designers, marketing staff and attorneys at Pfizer should receive great praise from their superiors, Pfizer stockholders and the providers and institutions who received payments. This is by far the most difficult format to see who in your area takes how much from whom. Every other company revealing this information (under duress or not) presented the data in a very straight-forward fashion.
Great job on fulfilling the letter of the agreement, while thwarting the spirit.
Next time maybe the laywers representing the public will specify the format for presenting the information.
Codes R not us.
We have seen a lot about the bigpharma and what they do unethically, illegally, criminally to enhance their “returns”.Everyone talks about them and is after them, with good reason. But what about the doctors. Those who go along with bigpharma schemes, anything from pushing drugs off label (for good fee), accepting all kinds of $$ as bribes etc. etc. After all those shady bigpharma schemes are directed toward doctors who are their key to larger sales be it via Rxes written for a “fee”, be it speaking on behalf of drug/company for huge honoraria, be it going along with “science” according to the bigpharma that pays for it, the list is endless. Yes, what about these doctors? When is someone going to expose them for what they are, bought and paid for servants of bigpharma.
The rules and codes and laws can be tightened but the creative boys from bigpharma will always come up with ways to go around them and do their stuff. They are so creative and good at what they do that most often the illegal part of their promotion, offlabel for instance, is literally undetectable. They are able to blend it, hide it into their sales story in such a way that very few can decipher it.That is the main reason why so few whistleblowers are available and are successful.
Foggy Bottom
I have found all these sites very difficult to use. Part of the reason is that dividing payment reporting into quarters keeps the data “disaggregated” …kinda like trickling in Medwatch reports over many moons.
With transparency like this, who needs smoke and mirrors?!
Suzanne
I found four recipients with various surnames tucked away in the D’s, such as ‘Dr. John Smith’ (instead of where you would look in the S’s for ‘Smith, John’).
jillmd
i have similar views as the 4 other posters.
this website is tough to navigate and not transparent.
Confused
Maybe its just me but why do you care if a doctor speaks for a pharma company. Either you feel your doctor is ethical or not. And if you decide that he is being swayed by pharma then don’t go there. I am not a big fan of the nanny state and can figure things out for myself.
pharmavet
Dr. Helm, I don’t think that there was any web design artistry considered here. My guess is that a low-level programmer was told to create the simplest possible spreadsheet into which the data could be dumped.
JPB
I went to the Lilly site and noted that there was NO search function. You have to scroll down the entire list!
harpy
y’all are a tough crowd. have any of you read the disclosure requirements for the different states lately? what you have to record, for whom, report when, one wants this, another wants that. and add on top Pfizer’s CIA and the just-passed Sunshine provisions….it’s like trying to take a Starbuck’s order in a Beverly Hills spa and being told you got the wrong color cups. don’t get me wrong - I’d love to see some Pfizer peeps doing the perp walk - but I have pity on the poor IT souls who had to come up with this database.
harpy
JPB - there’s a search function right under the “2009 to Date Aggregate”
Pharma Conduct Guy
PharmaVet said: …I don’t think that there was any web design artistry considered here. My guess is that a low-level programmer was told to create the simplest possible spreadsheet into which the data could be dumped.
Pharmavet, come on, do you really believe that Pfizer would love such an important task to a low level programmer? As someone who has worked for Pfizer (and Wyeth), I can assure you that this project was closely managed by a senior exec.
As for Pfizer’s result being the simplest possible spreadsheet, it is far from that. the simplest possible format would have been a straight HTML table, which would have yielded several key advantages such as 1) not requiring the overhead of a dynamically rendered Java Server Page (JSP), 2) copying to Excel or a 3rd party app would have been much easier.
With the current format, a lot of work was put into this reporting app, but curiously, some very simple things were overlooked, like 1) being able to re-sort by any columns or 2) being able to filter by amount or last name only.
All of the features I mention, along with many more, would have been trivial to implement in the current application. Furthermore, after looking at the underlying HTML source code, I can tell that whoever wrote it understood HTML very well, yet the data is output in a manner to render well to the screen, but to thwart the efforts of anyone willing to scroll a single page at a time and copy/paste to another application.
I can only think of one rational reason why anyone would go to the trouble to build a JSP application with the features I’m mentioning…does anyone else care to take a guess why?
pharmavet
PCG, you are obviously more computer sophisticated than I. If I understand your implication, a proper programmer would have made a nice user-friendly table. However, a senior executive had to step in in order to make the table less navigable, more confusing and harder to read. This sounds rather devious, if I am correct. Is that your suggestion?
I’m so used to working with spreadsheets I automatically assume everyone is doing it. In my most recent job as a consult in strategic development, I have built more than my share of spreadsheets containing the names of people to be downsized. Not a fun job, but it pays the rent.
M Helm, MD
Pharma Conduct Guy, clearly we agree. But did you have opportunity to try a few queries, using the “search” function Harpy mentions? It does not always return the same result set. More specifically, sometimes it includes records which do not match criteria, and omits records which would. So, not only does it have the deficiencies previously mentioned, you can never be sure that the search output produced is a complete set of all criteria matches.
Pharmavet, this is not a simple spreadsheet. The simplest mode would likely be a PDF (which I think at least one other major Pharma did). Not searchable on an interactive basis, but easy to find what you need in using the Adobe search function.
Confused, sometimes PhRMA attempts to influence state law - typically to the benefit of only one or a small number of brand name manufacturer. Other times there are tiffs over policy issues with payors/insurers. It is useful to know which providers have which interests/potential conflicts. It has less to do with trusting your personal physician, and much more to do with the beneficial effects of sunshine.
Pharma Conduct Guy
I’ll be shedding some much needed light on this real soon, hopefully later today. When I’m done, I’ll post here and on my blog.
Pharma Conduct Guy
I forgot to post an update here. Click on my name in the comment header to the left and you can see the various articles I’ve written on this subject.