"Conflicts of interest" is probably the most frequently used Health Care Renewal tag. We believe conflicts of interest are a major causes of health care dysfunction. Therefore, I felt that one of the truly reformative aspects of the US Accountable Care Act (ACA, "Obamacare") could be the "Sunshine Act," a provision championed by Iowa Senator Grassley (R) and his staff investigator, Paul Thacker, that would require public reporting of most financial interactions among health care corporations and health care professionals and hospitals.
The roll-out of Sunshine Act implementation occurred this week, and not unexpectedly, was very rocky. As reported by the Wall Street Journal,
But why should we have expected anything else, given the parties involved?
Drug, Device and Biotechnology Companies
As reported by the NY Times,
Presumably such reporting actually was quite burdensome to the companies.
Furthermore,company executives might not be exactly thrilled about putting all this information out there. As we have frequently discussed, to serve their own interests, such companies make all sorts of payments to physicians, other health care professional, and hospitals and other non-profit health care organizations. In particular, payments to health care professionals may foster companies' marketing and public relations goals.
While some payments are made for technical and clinical consulting, many are to support "education" that may serve marketing or public relations. In particular, many payments are for "drug talks," that is, talks sponsored by the drug companies, usually through speakers' bureaus, and given probably not as part of formal, accredited continuing medical education. Since the publication of "Dr Drug Rep" in the New York Times in 2007, it became evident that such talks emphasize content provided by the pharmaceutical companies, and are intended to be corporate marketing exercises. From that case we also learned that physicians who deviate from the marketing message do not last long on speakers' bureaus. (See posts here and here.)
In addition, pharmaceutical companies often pay physicians deemed to be "key opinion leaders," whose opinions are promoted supposedly for their brilliance and erudition. However, as noted here and here, the companies buying their services think of KOLs as sales people. Evidence about key opinion leaders actually performing like marketers has come from documents revealed during litigation (e.g., see this recent example of a huge monetary settlement made of charges that GlaxoSmithKline, a major multinational drug company committed fraud among other things, and in the course of its unethical activities used key opinion leaders as marketers). Also, see the Neurontin marketing plan (see post here), and the Lexapro marketing plan (see post here) for examples of how corporate managers view key opinion leaders as marketers.
Pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and device companies protest that much of the money they pay goes to support research. But the clinical research they sponsor has been shown to be frequently subject to manipulation designed to increase the likelihood of results favorable to these companies' products. When manipulation fails to provide sufficiently favorable results, corporations may simply suppress it. Academic institutions desperate for more external funding, and physicians whose continued gainful employment at such institutions requires external funding may not be too quick to protest manipulation and suppression by those paying the bills.
Vox just summarized some of the relevant evidence:
So is it any surprise that industry may not have been enthused or comfortable about complying with the Sunshine Act? Instead of admitting that, of course, they have complained, as reported by the NY Times,
But it seems that industry may have created the sorts of data problems about which they now complain. Note that when ProPublica made this first assessment of the database,
So it appears that the companies reported data in a confusing, perhaps deliberately confusing manner, obfuscating the relationships between companies and subsidiaries, and between essentially similar drugs with different names. It is hard to believe that all, or even most of these problems were due to mishandling by the government. So it is a little hard to take the companies' criticisms of the quality of the data seriously.
Physicians and Organized Medicine
"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo
On the other hand, news articles suggested some physicians were also unhappy with the data release. For example, per the WSJ article,
That seems to be a bit of quibble. The amount he received, and its source, seem more important than whether it was labelled "consulting," or "food and beverage" payments.
More importantly, a few doctors were worried, as reported by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, that the information may reflect negatively on them,
Maybe Dr Harbaugh should realize that there already are a lot of reasons to think about the negative aspects of physician - industry paid interactions, as summarized above. And Vox reported,
Dr Stossel did not provide evidence to explain the necessity or benefits of the work for industry, nor why doctors could not design clinical trials outside of industry relationships.
Doctors also complained about data quality, but I am not aware that the medical profession rushed to help with improving the data for the Sunshine Act. Obviously, there are some physicians who have personally profited quite a lot from their relationships with drug, device, and biotechnology companies but who may not be comfortable having the figures booted around in public, e.g., per the WSJ,
And those were payments made in a five month period. Maybe the doctors have a reason to be uncomfortable.
Furthermore, ProPublica reported that 21% of the $3.5 billion in payments, approximately $735 million, reported by the system were for "promotional talks," a la "drug talks" as noted above. Since "Dr Drug Rep," such talks have gotten something of a bad reputation, but are obviously lucrative, so those who got paid to give them may not be happy with their detailed disclosure.
The US Department of Health and Human Services
The Sunshine Act was but a small part of the huge ACA, most of which the US DHHS, and particularly the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) was charged with implementing, but probably with proportionately insufficient funding and time. So no wonder that the Sunshine Act never seemed to find a vocal champion within DHHS.
Most likely money concerns, and the constant din of outside criticism of "government bureaucrats" by those demanding more "business-like" government lead CMS to outsource the work on the Sunshine Act database, as described by another ProPublica article,
Massachusetts also outsourced operation of its Health Connector to CGI Federal, with equally bad results. The state had to terminate the contract (look here.)
So if lackadaisical bureaucrats outsourced the Sunshine Act to contractors of questionable competence, what result should have been expected?
Why the present administration, and the bureaucrats it supposedly commands, seemed so uninterested in this particular aspect of the ACA is not clear, but perhaps we should peer around some revolving doors for the answer. (For example, John Podesta, a current White House adviser, worked for non-profits funded by drug company Eli Lilly and device company Synthes [look here]; and Nancy-Ann DeParle, former White House "health czar," had previously served on the boards of of Boston Scientific, Cerner and Medco [look here], and now is involved in health care investments made by private equity, and is on the board of CVS [look here]).
Of course, the sort of conflicts of interest that were supposed to be revealed by the Sunshine Act are highly beneficial to the parties directly involved, whatever embarrassment they may cause. Given the power of those parties, plus the lukewarm, outsourced effort by government perhaps influenced by government officials with their own "revolving door" conflicts of interest, is it any wonder that the Sunshine Act implementation was "rocky?"
Summary
Nonetheless, because of the Sunshine Act, we do now know a bit more about conflicts of interest involving drug, device, biotechnology and related companies on one hand, and physicians, other health care professionals and hospitals on the other.
Maybe throwing even veiled sunshine on some of these relationships will inspire some people to rethink whether they want to continue them. There are other reasons they should do so.
We have called endlessly for full, detailed disclosures of all conflicts of interest, for honesty's sake if for no other reason. We have also called for severe curtailment of all conflicts affecting clinical decision making, health care education, clinical and health care research, and health policy making. But Health Care Renewal can easily be dismissed as a voice crying out in the wilderness. However, we are really not alone.
The 2009 Institute of Medicine report set relatively tough standards for managing conflicts of interest affecting clinical research and teaching, which unfortunately since have largely been ignored. It did call for senior institutional officials to disclose their conflicts of interest, and for institutional boards of trustees to form conflicts of interest committees that would exclude conflicted individuals, but otherwise did not address conflicts of interest affecting academic leaders or institutional trustees. The 2013 Pew Charitable Trusts Conflicts-of-Interest Policies for Academic Medical Centers suggested restrictions on conflicts affecting faculty, trainees, and students, but again did not mention senior institutional leaders or boards of trustees. Implementing even some of these recommendations would be true health care reform.
Maybe more publicity about the web of conflicts of interest that drapes of over health care will lead to some further steps in the needed direction.
The roll-out of Sunshine Act implementation occurred this week, and not unexpectedly, was very rocky. As reported by the Wall Street Journal,
it hasn't been a smooth process. First, CMS delayed the public reporting of the data by a year to give companies more time to prepare. The Open Payments online system has experienced technical problems, including a data mix-up that resulted in some doctors being linked to payment records for other doctors with the same surname. The preview function for doctors had a cumbersome registration process, some doctors said, and was taken offline at times in recent weeks.
The first batch of data is incomplete. CMS in August said it removed about one-third of the payment records from the physician-preview database because it said some of the state medical-license numbers that companies reported for doctors didn't match a database that the agency was using for verification, among other problems. CMS now is releasing those records but without identifying the physicians tied to them. It will update the database to include the physicians' names for those records next year. Also, CMS isn't immediately releasing payments related to proprietary research-and-development; those will be reported at a later date.
But why should we have expected anything else, given the parties involved?
Drug, Device and Biotechnology Companies
As reported by the NY Times,
all manufacturers of drugs, medical devices and medical supplies that have at least one product covered by Medicare or Medicaid must report payments or gifts they make to doctors and teaching hospitals. This can be as seemingly trivial as a bag of bagels — all payments above $10 are included — or as lofty as a research grant. It also includes meals, travel expenses and speakers’ fees. Group-purchasing organizations, which serve as middlemen between health care providers and manufacturers, also must disclose doctors’ ownership and investment interests in their companies.
Presumably such reporting actually was quite burdensome to the companies.
Furthermore,company executives might not be exactly thrilled about putting all this information out there. As we have frequently discussed, to serve their own interests, such companies make all sorts of payments to physicians, other health care professional, and hospitals and other non-profit health care organizations. In particular, payments to health care professionals may foster companies' marketing and public relations goals.
While some payments are made for technical and clinical consulting, many are to support "education" that may serve marketing or public relations. In particular, many payments are for "drug talks," that is, talks sponsored by the drug companies, usually through speakers' bureaus, and given probably not as part of formal, accredited continuing medical education. Since the publication of "Dr Drug Rep" in the New York Times in 2007, it became evident that such talks emphasize content provided by the pharmaceutical companies, and are intended to be corporate marketing exercises. From that case we also learned that physicians who deviate from the marketing message do not last long on speakers' bureaus. (See posts here and here.)
In addition, pharmaceutical companies often pay physicians deemed to be "key opinion leaders," whose opinions are promoted supposedly for their brilliance and erudition. However, as noted here and here, the companies buying their services think of KOLs as sales people. Evidence about key opinion leaders actually performing like marketers has come from documents revealed during litigation (e.g., see this recent example of a huge monetary settlement made of charges that GlaxoSmithKline, a major multinational drug company committed fraud among other things, and in the course of its unethical activities used key opinion leaders as marketers). Also, see the Neurontin marketing plan (see post here), and the Lexapro marketing plan (see post here) for examples of how corporate managers view key opinion leaders as marketers.
Pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and device companies protest that much of the money they pay goes to support research. But the clinical research they sponsor has been shown to be frequently subject to manipulation designed to increase the likelihood of results favorable to these companies' products. When manipulation fails to provide sufficiently favorable results, corporations may simply suppress it. Academic institutions desperate for more external funding, and physicians whose continued gainful employment at such institutions requires external funding may not be too quick to protest manipulation and suppression by those paying the bills.
Vox just summarized some of the relevant evidence:
Research for decades has shown that relations with industry — from industry-sponsored education to encounters with pharmaceutical-company sales representatives, and even drug samples provided by those companies — can bias a doctor's judgment in all sorts of ways. It can color the medical education they give to future doctors, cause them to inappropriately prescribe drugs, to push for the FDA approval of medicine, or for drugs to be included on their hospital formularies. Industry-funded studies are also four times more likely to lead to favorable and positive results than independent research.
The side-effects of this 'Bad Pharma' behavior range from waste in the health system, to mistreatment of patients, and even avoidable patient death.
So is it any surprise that industry may not have been enthused or comfortable about complying with the Sunshine Act? Instead of admitting that, of course, they have complained, as reported by the NY Times,
the website is being questioned by the industry, which says that technical problems and data inaccuracies limit its value.
But it seems that industry may have created the sorts of data problems about which they now complain. Note that when ProPublica made this first assessment of the database,
Many drug and device companies attributed payments to multiple subsidiaries, rather than reporting them under the name of a single parent company. Johnson & Johnson, for instance, submitted payments under at least 15 subsidiaries. The device maker Medtronic reported payments by at least six subsidiaries. So did the drug maker Novartis. On first blush, that makes it tough to calculate how much each company spent overall.
Similarly, companies reported payments associated with particular drugs in different ways. The expensive drug Acthar, which is marketed for a variety of different conditions, is listed under at least eight different name variations. The diabetes drug Januvia is reported as both 'Januvia' and 'Januvia Diabetes.' There is one drug simply listed as 'KNEES' and another as 'Foot and Ankle.'
So it appears that the companies reported data in a confusing, perhaps deliberately confusing manner, obfuscating the relationships between companies and subsidiaries, and between essentially similar drugs with different names. It is hard to believe that all, or even most of these problems were due to mishandling by the government. So it is a little hard to take the companies' criticisms of the quality of the data seriously.
Physicians and Organized Medicine
"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo
On the other hand, news articles suggested some physicians were also unhappy with the data release. For example, per the WSJ article,
Some doctors disputed details of the payment data. The database shows John LeDonne, a surgeon from Baltimore, as having received about $78,200 in payments for food and beverage for the five-month period from medical-device maker Dr. LeDonne acknowledged he performs paid consulting work for health-care companies including Teleflex, but that he rarely received free meals. He said the total payment amount was in the right 'ballpark,' but should not have been classified in the food-and-beverage category.
That seems to be a bit of quibble. The amount he received, and its source, seem more important than whether it was labelled "consulting," or "food and beverage" payments.
More importantly, a few doctors were worried, as reported by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, that the information may reflect negatively on them,
'Overwhelmingly, the interaction between industry and physicians is positive,' said Dr. Robert Harbaugh, chairman of neurosurgery at Penn State and president of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons.
Maybe Dr Harbaugh should realize that there already are a lot of reasons to think about the negative aspects of physician - industry paid interactions, as summarized above. And Vox reported,
Dr. Thomas Stossel, known as Harvard's 'pro-industry professor,' says 'doctors' work with industry is necessary and beneficial.' He worries that the Sunshine Act could make it embarrassing and difficult for doctors to do work like developing medical devices or designing clinical trials, and that industry may start avoiding working with American doctors because of the time and investment disclosure will require.
Dr Stossel did not provide evidence to explain the necessity or benefits of the work for industry, nor why doctors could not design clinical trials outside of industry relationships.
Doctors also complained about data quality, but I am not aware that the medical profession rushed to help with improving the data for the Sunshine Act. Obviously, there are some physicians who have personally profited quite a lot from their relationships with drug, device, and biotechnology companies but who may not be comfortable having the figures booted around in public, e.g., per the WSJ,
Among individual physicians, Stephen Burkhart was one of the top recipients of non-research payments from industry. The San Antonio orthopedic surgeon received $7.4 million in non-research payments or transfers of value for the five-month period, mostly from device manufacturer Arthrex Inc. for payments identified as 'royalty or license.'
Dr. Burkhart couldn't be reached for comment. Arthrex said in a statement that it has 'financial relationships with a number of orthopedic surgeons and teaching hospitals,' like many manufacturers, for their advice and expertise.
Chitranjan Ranawat,a New York orthopedic surgeon, received about $4 million in nonresearch payments or transfers of value, mostly from DePuy Synthes unit for 'royalty or license,' according to the database.
Dr. Ranawat couldn't be reached for comment.
And those were payments made in a five month period. Maybe the doctors have a reason to be uncomfortable.
Furthermore, ProPublica reported that 21% of the $3.5 billion in payments, approximately $735 million, reported by the system were for "promotional talks," a la "drug talks" as noted above. Since "Dr Drug Rep," such talks have gotten something of a bad reputation, but are obviously lucrative, so those who got paid to give them may not be happy with their detailed disclosure.
The US Department of Health and Human Services
The Sunshine Act was but a small part of the huge ACA, most of which the US DHHS, and particularly the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) was charged with implementing, but probably with proportionately insufficient funding and time. So no wonder that the Sunshine Act never seemed to find a vocal champion within DHHS.
Most likely money concerns, and the constant din of outside criticism of "government bureaucrats" by those demanding more "business-like" government lead CMS to outsource the work on the Sunshine Act database, as described by another ProPublica article,
While the payments database is a far cry from Healthcare.gov — and less complex – it's reasonable to expect some glitches. CGI Federal, the company that led what turned out to be the botched launch of Healthcare.gov, is also responsible for the release of the payment data.
Massachusetts also outsourced operation of its Health Connector to CGI Federal, with equally bad results. The state had to terminate the contract (look here.)
So if lackadaisical bureaucrats outsourced the Sunshine Act to contractors of questionable competence, what result should have been expected?
Why the present administration, and the bureaucrats it supposedly commands, seemed so uninterested in this particular aspect of the ACA is not clear, but perhaps we should peer around some revolving doors for the answer. (For example, John Podesta, a current White House adviser, worked for non-profits funded by drug company Eli Lilly and device company Synthes [look here]; and Nancy-Ann DeParle, former White House "health czar," had previously served on the boards of of Boston Scientific, Cerner and Medco [look here], and now is involved in health care investments made by private equity, and is on the board of CVS [look here]).
Of course, the sort of conflicts of interest that were supposed to be revealed by the Sunshine Act are highly beneficial to the parties directly involved, whatever embarrassment they may cause. Given the power of those parties, plus the lukewarm, outsourced effort by government perhaps influenced by government officials with their own "revolving door" conflicts of interest, is it any wonder that the Sunshine Act implementation was "rocky?"
Summary
Nonetheless, because of the Sunshine Act, we do now know a bit more about conflicts of interest involving drug, device, biotechnology and related companies on one hand, and physicians, other health care professionals and hospitals on the other.
Maybe throwing even veiled sunshine on some of these relationships will inspire some people to rethink whether they want to continue them. There are other reasons they should do so.
We have called endlessly for full, detailed disclosures of all conflicts of interest, for honesty's sake if for no other reason. We have also called for severe curtailment of all conflicts affecting clinical decision making, health care education, clinical and health care research, and health policy making. But Health Care Renewal can easily be dismissed as a voice crying out in the wilderness. However, we are really not alone.
The 2009 Institute of Medicine report set relatively tough standards for managing conflicts of interest affecting clinical research and teaching, which unfortunately since have largely been ignored. It did call for senior institutional officials to disclose their conflicts of interest, and for institutional boards of trustees to form conflicts of interest committees that would exclude conflicted individuals, but otherwise did not address conflicts of interest affecting academic leaders or institutional trustees. The 2013 Pew Charitable Trusts Conflicts-of-Interest Policies for Academic Medical Centers suggested restrictions on conflicts affecting faculty, trainees, and students, but again did not mention senior institutional leaders or boards of trustees. Implementing even some of these recommendations would be true health care reform.
Maybe more publicity about the web of conflicts of interest that drapes of over health care will lead to some further steps in the needed direction.
