We’ve aggregated information from the websites of some large drug companies, which publish their payments as a condition of settling federal whistle-blower lawsuits alleging improper marketing or kickbacks. Today, in cooperation with the website Pharmashine, we’ve added data for 2013, which now covers 17 drug companies accounting for half of United States drug sales that year.
1)Many, many health professionals have relationships with industry.
Dollars for Docs now includes 3.4 million payments since 2009, totaling more than $4 billion, of which $2.5 billion was for research. For 2013 alone, there were 1.2 million payments valued at nearly $1.4 billion.
It’s not possible to calculate the exact number of physicians represented, because drug companies haven’t used unique identification numbers that cross company lines. But it’s clear that the figure is in the hundreds of thousands.
Excluding research payments, the drugmaker Pfizer appeared to have interactions with the most health care professionals last year — about 142,600. AstraZeneca came in second with about 111,200. Johnson & Johnson and Forest Labs each had nearly 100,000. There are an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 active doctors in the United States.
Those who read the fine-print disclosures accompanying medical journal articles know that doctors often have relationships with several companies that compete in a drug category (such as heart drugs or those for schizophrenia). Our data bear that out.
Some highly sought-after key opinion leaders, as they are known in the industry, work for half a dozen or more companies in a given year.(...)
3)The biggest companies aren’t always the ones that spend the most. Some smaller drug companies spend big, too.
4)Meals vastly outnumber all other interactions between drug companies and doctors. But they account for a much smaller share of costs.
Más
Ver también:
Entradas
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario