US Sunshine Act

Unite Here, a union that represents about 270,000 hotel workers, kicked off a program to stop pharma’s funding of CME courses. The group is collecting petition signatures in more than 30 cities across the U.S. and gathering support via its website, “No More Drug Money”, to pressure the Accrediting Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) to change the status quo. We are sick of the ballooning cost of healthcare in the United States, and we are sick of doctors prescribing brand name drugs when cheaper generic alternatives would do just fine. CME has been a major focus for pharmaceutical dollars. …

A nurse practitioner in Connecticut pleaded guilty in June to taking $83,000 in kickbacks from a drug company in exchange for prescribing its high-priced drug to treat cancer pain. In some cases, she delivered promotional talks attended only by herself and a company sales representative. But when the federal government released data Tuesday on payments by drug and device companies to doctors and teaching hospitals, the payments to nurse practitioner Heather Alfonso, 42, were nowhere to be found. That’s because the federal Physician Payment Sunshine Act doesn’t require companies to publicly report payments to nurse practitioners or physician assistants, even …

Posted by Thomas Sullivan Yesterday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services published the second year of Open Payments data, detailing the transfers of value made from pharmaceutical and device manufacturers to physicians and teaching hospitals in 2014. The top line total has received most of the headlines—“docs get $6.5 billion from drug and device companies.” Here, with data courtesy of Open Payments Analytics, we break down a some of those payments in detail, with more to follow in subsequent articles. To read the artcle by Thomas Sullivan in Policy and Medicine To explore the Open Payments data set with Open …

New data on payments from drug and device companies to doctors show that many doctors received payments on 100 or more days last year. Some received payments on more days than they didn’t. Where Did the Payments Go in 2014? A breakdown of general payments by category, not including research or payments to physician owners of a company. To read the article by Charles Ornstein and Ryann Grochowski Jones, ProPublica

Posted by Thomas Sullivan The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) today published 2014 Open Payments data about transfers of value by drug and medical device makers to health care providers. The data includes information about 11.4 million financial transactions attributed to over 600,000 physicians and more than 1,100 teaching hospitals, totaling $6.49 billion. This is compared to 4.3 million records attributed to 470,000 physicians and 1,019 teaching hospitals covering $3.43 billion dollars, according to CMS’s summary data. Like last year, the datasets are available in three separate spreadsheets—general payments, research payments, and ownership interests. Interestingly, it appears ownership …