FiercePharma | Tracy Stanton
The criticism was inevitable when the U.S. government rolled out its first
batch of Sunshine Act data in
October. Drugmakers and doctors had already been grousing about omitted entries
and misleading info. We at FiercePharma had our own selfish complaint:
The Open Payments database is monstrous--way too large for us to download and
analyze with our paltry computing power.
Lucky for us--and for readers--there's ProPublica, which has taken on
the Sunshine data as one of its personal missions. The online news organization
has put the physician and hospital payment information into its own database,
easily searched online. Thanks to them, we now know which companies are rolling
the most money into physician-speakers and other doctor-directed
promotions--and on behalf of which drugs.
The top 10 list is below. As you'll see, some of the drugs are newly
approved. Some have new competitors. Some have new indications to tout. Others
are carrying a load of expectations for their companies, justified or not.
The practice of paying doctors to speak on behalf of drugs has grown
controversial in recent years, partly because of some high-profile scandals
involving highly paid physicians. Buying lunch--even coffee--for doctors isn't
critic-free either. Though doctors deny it, studies have shown that prescribing
habits change because of speaking gigs and dinner presentations. Some
drugmakers have ratcheted back their payments to doctors in response to the criticism;
GlaxoSmithKline ($GSK) went so far as to back off
of doctor-speakers altogether.
But as the numbers below show, speaking fees aren't going away. Neither is
free lunch. Pharma companies want to get the word out about their meds, and
this is a tried-and-true method of doing so.
The ProPublica numbers include payments to physicians and teaching
hospitals, excluding royalties and research deals. The idea is to zero in on
marketing-related payments. They cover the last 5 months of 2013, the most
recent data available; the feds recently said they would roll out new Sunshine
Act data once a year.
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2
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3
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4
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5
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6
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7
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Humira
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8
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9
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Daliresp
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10
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