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Inconsistencies seen between self-declared conflicts of interests, open payments database findings for industry paid physicians
Among published physicians who received the highest industry payments, researchers found “a high level of inconsistency” between physicians’ self-declared conflicts of interest and information from an open payments database.
“Current system of reporting of conflict of interest is broken and this allows for failure to declare conflict of interest even in physicians who receive the highest payments,” Mehraneh Dorna Jafari, MD, told Healio.com/Orthopedics. “Therefore, we propose a new standard of full disclosure to allow the reader to make an informed decision.”
Researchers used the 2015 Open payments Database general payment data to perform a population-based bibliometric analysis to identify 10 surgical and medical device manufacturing companies and 100 physicians from each company who received the highest compensation. Investigators recorded the total amount of general payments, number of payments, institution type and academic rank for the 100 physicians. A PubMed search was performed to identify articles published by each physician between Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, 2016 and their conflict of interest (COI) declaration. Bibliometric data were identified with Scopus and were reported as the h index (number of papers by a researcher with at least h citations each). Discrepancy between self-declared COI and industry payments was the primary outcome of the study.
Results showed the 100 physicians were paid a total of $12,446,969. The median payment was $95,993. Investigators noted 50 physicians were faculty at academic institutions. With regard to study authors, the mean h index was 18. In total, 412 articles were published by the 50 physicians in 2016. There was a mean of four publications and a median of one publication. There were 225 articles that were considered relevant to the general payments by the authors. Of the 225 relevant articles, authors declared their potential COI in 84 articles. –by Monica Jaramillo
Disclosures: Ziai reports no relevant financial disclosures. Please see the full study for a list of all other authors’ relevant financial disclosures.