The healthcare giant joins a growing list of drugmakers that are disclosing info about their financial ties to physicians. The move comes after passage of the health care reform bill, which includes a provision known as Physician Payments Sunshine that requires drugmakers each year to record - starting 2012 - all gifts and payments to docs and teaching hospitals. Posting begins in 2013.

The J&J list, however, offers both good news and bad news. The good news? J&J is disclosing payments. The bad news? Since J&J runs what are effectively different operating units, there are separate lists for separate units - which makes it difficult to get the bigger picture. The J&J units that have posted their first quarterly reports are Ortho-McNeil-Janssen, Centocor Ortho Biotech and Tibotec.

Why is there no aggregate disclosure? Because each link represents and individual legal entity, a J&J spokesman tells The Wall Street Journal. Consequently, anyone wishing to compile what J&J has paid docs will have to create their own spreadsheet. And unlike the Pfizer site, for instance, there is no info on money paid for meals, non-educational items or research (back story).

“The other way in which the J&J disclosures are not aggregated is that each payment is reported separately, so a patient would have to manually total each individual payment to know how much a physician had received, even from a single operating unit.” says Allan Coukell, director of the Pew Prescription Project, which worked for Sunshine provision. And “J&J is reporting payments greater than $25, for any individual who receives an aggregate of more than $250. The Sunshine threshold is $10.”

A larger problem? The drugmakers that do post disclosures - GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Lilly, Merck and Cephalon - do not all use the same format. This is another impediment to gaining a top-down view, which is why a uniform approach has been pushed (see background here). What do you get from J&J? The reports tally each payment for speaking, consulting and, in a very few cases, post-marketing safety surveillance. Take a look and you’ll see numerous docs received several thousand dollars each during this year’s first quarter.

Photo courtesy of Jerome Kassirer