Of Pens, Pizzas, and Pharmaceuticals

Abstract

Much ado about pharma freebies to physicians. Much ado about nothing medically and everything politically. A new study published by JAMA Internal Medicine (Pharmaceutical Industry–Sponsored Meals and Physician Prescribing Patterns for Medicare Beneficiaries)makes it sound (as Meagan McArdle has written for Bloomberg), that your doctor is “willing to sell you out for the price of a sandwich.†It’s not that simple … or true.

A valuable takeaway from the new JAMA study should be that wide adoption of Open Payments reporting has led to transparent interactions and value exchanges of education, money and meals between the pharmaceutical industry and prescribers. These data are now available to inform and improve educational efforts to meet the treatment needs of patients using the latest advances in medicine and science. However, such data must be cautiously interpreted with full acknowledgement of study limitations and author bias.