According to a report, 10 Canadian-based firms have agreed to divulge the amount of money they give to physicians and health organizations every year. They say the voluntary program should make the financial ties between pharma and medicine more visible – and help “neutralize” charges of conflict of interest. The firms plan to start publishing statistics on their overall payments to health professionals next year, though will stop short of releasing figures for individual physicians, as now required in the United States.
The program was started by GlaxoSmithKline Canada (GSK) and has been endorsed by Innovative Medicines Canada, which is the pharmaceutical sector’s trade association. GSK expects other companies to join soon, but already counts Eli Lily, Gilead, Abbive, Amgen, and others are participants. Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, Bayer, and Sanofi are noted as being absent thus far.
The plan will publish only “aggregate” amounts, in contrast to the Sunshine Act in the United States which requires industry to publicly post the amount firms give individual, named doctors and hospitals.
Edward Gudaitis, general manager of Gilead Canada, said the Canadian companies will release figures in three areas: fees for consulting, speaking and other services provided by health professionals; money given doctors to travel to international functions; and grants provided to some health-care organizations.
“This … will help shine a light on it and provide a level of integrity and comfort for people,” he said. “It’s where society is taking us and industry needs to be.”
GSK says it has also recently launched its own, separate measures. The company no longer pays sales reps bonuses based on the number of prescriptions doctors issue for their products. Additionally, instead of outside specialists speaking on GSK’s behalf to other doctors, such talks are now given only by physicians clearly identified as being on the company staff.
The changes “are designed to bring greater clarity and confidence that whenever we talk to a doctor, nurse or other prescriber, it is patients’ interests that always come first,” CEO Andrew Witty said in a statement. “We recognize that we have an important role to play in providing doctors with information about our medicines, but this must be done clearly, transparently and without any perception of conflict of interest.”
Since Witty took over in 2008, Glaxo has broken with the Big Pharma pack in other ways. Most recently, the company promised to open up its clinical data–all of it, with identifying information stripped out–for scrutiny by outside researchers. The company was also among the first to cut prices in the developing world, to open up access to drugs and gain market share at the same time.