Doctors and hospitals often have financial relationships with healthcare manufacturing companies. These relationships clearly can have an affect on a physician’s decision-making process. However, until recently it was very difficult to understand or research the financial relationship between physicians and drug and device manufactures.
The Affordable Care Act has changed the status quo, by mandating that the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) track and report payments between physicians and drug and medical device manufactures. In fulfilling this requirement, CMS created a website you can find here:
[OpenPaymentsData](https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/)
This allows people to discover what payments their medical providers have received from various drug makers and medical device manufactures.
According to CMS’s webpage last year drug and medical device manufactures paid physicians and teaching hospitals $6.49 billion. A summary posed on the website states that approximately 607,000 doctors received $3.2 billion for research, and $2.6 billion for other purposes. Clearly no business spends this kind of money without getting some return for their investment.
Money motivates people to take risks they otherwise would not take, and physicians are no different. Since “smoking gun” evidence rarely exists in medical malpractice cases, oftentimes plaintiffs and their attorneys are left searching for reasons to explain to a jury why malpractice occurred. With drug and medical device companies spending billions of dollars to influence doctors, the new CMS’s webpage provides plaintiffs and their attorneys with a new tool for unraveling these relationships.
This new transparency is helpful to victims of malpractice and their attorneys because it helps them uncover financial relationships between physician and a healthcare company. Discovering these relationships can help explain to a jury why a negligent doctor made certain decisions.
For example, a financial relationship could explain why a surgeon sold a patient on a particular surgical technique that he had just learned at a seminar, even though the surgeon had only limited practice performing the surgery. Why? Because the surgeon’s seminar tuition and travel were paid for by the company that stood to benefit financially from the surgeon utilizing the new technique. Another example is how a pharmaceutical company regularly wining and dining a physician may explain why that doctor always prescribes a certain drug manufactured by the company, even though cheaper or safer alternative drugs exist.
