Device, drug firms pay $3.5B to providers

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

From research grants to travel junkets, drug and medical-device companies paid doctors and leading hospitals billions of dollars last year, the government disclosed Tuesday in a new effort to spotlight potential ethical conflicts in medicine.

Industry spent nearly $3.5 billion on such payments in the five-month period from August through December 2013, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which released data on 4.4 million payments.

The massive trove of information identified companies and many of the recipients. Also listed were types of payments, with details down to travel destinations. Some 546,000 clinicians and 1,360 teaching hospitals received payments. Some doctors had ownership stakes in companies.

It’s part of a new initiative called Open Payments, mandated by President Barack Obama’s health care law. It was intended to allow patients to look up their own doctors online, but that functionality isn’t fully ready yet. In future years, the information will cover a full 12 months, officials said.

Consumer groups called the move a much-needed step toward transparency about relationships that can influence patients’ care. But doctors and industry said the government rushed to release the data, and they raised questions about accuracy and lack of context. The administration said it’s not pointing a finger at the medical profession or the pharmaceutical industry.

“Open Payments does not identify which financial relationships ... could cause conflicts of interest,” said Shantanu Agrawal, the agency official overseeing the project. “It simply makes the data available to the public.”