The Sunshine Act

In the blog I wrote in June 2012 I discussed the proposed physician payment Sunshine Act in the USA. This has now come into effect as of August 1st 2013 and it will be interesting to see what impact this has on physician payments and this rather hidden interaction between industry and medical practitioners. As noted in the BMJ a national physician survey in 2009 in the USA found that 83% of physicians had interactions with industry in one form or another. Again, as noted in the BMJ, in the state of Massachusetts where industry have had to disclose payments of more than $50 it transpired that in an 18 month period from July  2009 to the end of December 2011 some 32,000 payments were made to nearly 12,000 physicians, worth $76.7 million! Most of this money was for services such as consulting and participation in speaker’s bureaus, but interestingly the most common payment was for food. It will be interesting to see what transpires from this new legislation and no doubt it will stimulate efforts to promote greater transparency elsewhere and in particular in Europe.