Doctors receiving drugmaker payments more likely to prescribe their products, BMJ study finds
pharmafile | August 22, 2016 | News story | Research and Development, Sales and Marketing |
US physicians who received gifts and other payments from drug companies were more likely to prescribe branded anticoagulants and diabetes drugs, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has found.
The BMJ’s study examined almost 46 million Medicare Part D prescriptions written by over 623,000 doctors to more than 10 million patients for the last five months of 2013 and the whole of 2014. The study used the market share of prescribed branded drugs within their respective class and hospital referral regions as a primary analysis endpoint.
It was found that $13 spent on a doctor resulted in 94 extra days of brand-name anticoagulant prescriptions and 107 more days of branded non-insulin diabetes treatments. Additionally, it was found that doctors received 977,000 payments to the sum of over $61 million linked to anticoagulants and nearly 800,000 payments totalling $108 million for non-insulin diabetes drugs. The median market share in the 306 analysed hospital referral regions was 21.6% for anticoagulants and 1.6% for non-insulin diabetes drugs.
The study also found that payments to specialists were in line with significantly increased prescriptions versus those to non-specialists.
A spokesperson for the study noted: “Our findings support long-voiced concerns about the potential influence of even small payments to physicians by pharmaceutical companies. This influence on prescribing can potentially negatively affect patients through inappropriate prescribing, or more likely prescribing of more expensive branded drugs when cheaper, generic alternatives exist.”
Lead study author Will Fleischmann added: “”We’re not saying that the payment caused the prescription but that it’s tied to the prescription. For each payment in a region, they could expect three months of a medication being prescribed over a generic medication.”
Matt Fellows
