Physician Payment Sunshine: Eli Lilly Post Payments to Health Care Professionals
On Friday Eli Lilly became to first major pharmaceutical company to publish an online registry detailing 1st Quarter 2009 payments it has made to physicians and other health care professionals – a report known as its "faculty registry."
Lilly faculty are physicians and other health care professionals contracted to provide specific services on behalf of Lilly and the Lilly alliance partnerships. Faculty appearing in the registry either advised Lilly or conducted medical lectures designed for health care professionals and patient education. The site discloses each professional's name, location, description of the services provided and the compensation paid, among other details.
According to the Wall Street Journal Blog Lilly compensated physicians and health care professionals $22 million for services in the first quarter. Nearly 3,400 physicians and other health care professionals are in the dataset. The average payment per service provided is just over $1,000, with health care professionals conducting six activities on average.
"This registry is consistent with Lilly's efforts to increase transparency," said Jack Harris, M.D., Lilly's vice president of its U.S. medical division. "We see greater transparency as integral to rebuilding trust in our industry."
"Our contracted faculty are key resources in our efforts to improve individual patient outcomes," Harris said. "They advise us on how to bring the best new cures and treatments to market, and give lectures to their peers on Lilly products and disease-state information to help keep them current on the ever-changing field of medicine. And many of our faculty educate patients, at the request of their treating physician, on how to use the Lilly medicine prescribed to them."
Lilly's faculty registry is part of its commitment to enhancing transparency. In 2004, Lilly became the first company to voluntarily make public its clinical trials and its clinical trials data. In 2007, Lilly added another first by publicly reporting all of its educational grants and charitable contributions.
The registry includes videos and descriptions of services that are provided by health care providers for consulting and educational services and outlines the needs for such services.
Lilly announced last September it would begin to voluntarily disclose physician payments starting in the second half of 2009. In February 2009, Lilly entered into a Corporate Integrity Agreement with the Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and was required to disclose the information. Though those agreements only require Lilly to disclose this information directly to the States and Government, Lilly took the next step in providing disclosure on a public website.
The registry does an excellent job in explaining the need for professionals and should serve as a role model for other companies (Merck, Pfizer and GSK) plus others in best practices to provide disclosure of payments to physicians.