Earlier this month, pharmaceutical powerhouse AstraZeneca announced that it would disclose all payments to healthcare providers in all countries where it has commercial activities. The announcement, made by CEO Pascal Soriot, came at the annual meeting of investors.
According to The Times of London, Mr. Soriot stated, “[There was] no reason for us not to disclose.” He went on to note, “It’s only a question of making sure we have the tools to do it in an efficient and indeed transparent manner. I think we should be able to do it soon,” alluding to the fact that the company has been thinking about this for awhile and has started to create systems to ensure smooth reporting.
Compiling all of this information will not be easy, as the company has commercial operations and/or local offices with marketing programs in more than 100 countries, with tens of thousands of employees engaged in commercial activities at the end of 2017.
Not all countries have the requirement for reporting because they often do not have the bandwidth to collect and maintain the data. In the United States, companies are obligated to report payments under the Physician Payments Sunshine Act. With respect to AstraZeneca, in 2016, the company paid U.S. doctors an estimated $54 million in general payments (typically includes speaking and consulting fees), as compared to about $260 million it paid doctors for research.
The European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) Disclosure Code governs those payment reports, but different countries have different platforms. In the United Kingdom, for example, the data are hosted by the country’s pharmaceutical lobby group, the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry.
Currently, AstraZeneca and its subsidiaries report payments to healthcare professionals and organizations in several countries, including the United States, Europe, Australia, and Japan, as required by laws. By the end of 2019, it is estimated that additional disclosures will be made in eleven other countries across Latin America, Asia Pacific, north Africa, and the Middle East.
This transparency play by AstraZeneca may put pressure on other pharmaceutical companies to start disclosing all payments made, irrespective of whether there is a law in place requiring such disclosure. This is not the first time that AstraZeneca has been out in front on compliance issues. In 2011 AstraZeneca announced that they were no longer paying for travel by attendees to medical meetings this applied world wide. Several other companies followed suit and this year (2018) device associations in Europe, Asia and Middle East member companies discontinued directly paying for attendee travel to medical meetings.
All companies disclosing payments made will likely have one of two effects: it will accomplish what all “transparency hawks” believe will happen, which is that patients will understand how to effectively use this information to make the best decisions for their healthcare (unlikely as we have seen from the little bit of transparency we have currently), or all the noise will drown out the facts and it will become just another talking point.