Monday, 20 April 2015

Who paid for your doctor's lunch?

quote [ Sometimes, doctors and hospitals have financial relationships with health care manufacturing companies. These relationships can include money for research activities, gifts, speaking fees, meals, or travel... Open Payments is the federally run program that collects the information about these financial relationships and makes it available to you. ]

Live in the USA and want to know what drug rep has been giving gifts to your physician? This page searches records of incentives given to doctors by medical companies and drug vendors.
EDIT: The information is currently only searchable up to 2013, they're working on the more recent info.
Small amounts of money for food or travel reimbursement may not taint a doctor's judgement, but transparency keeps the system in check.
[SFW] [health] [+2]
[by twinkle@4:32amGMT]

Comments

ubie said[1] @ 5:02am GMT on 20th Apr [Score:2 Interesting]
I work in Biotech, but not on the sales side. We have to take a pretty intense training every year on ethics. I don't remember the exact time frame but at least 5 years ago this whole 'take them out for lunch' thing was officially frowned upon. If you're providing lunch it needs to be at their place, during a technical review of the product you are pitching and available to the entire plant. You can't take them anywhere and do the pitch there, you can't be selective about who attends and even then (for my company at least) you have several layers of bureaucracy to go through to get approval to make sure we don't run afoul of any laws or federal regs.

Seriously, I do inventory management at a client's site, don't even have access to pricing and I can't even buy my point of contact a coffee. I had to run being in Logistics doughnut club by HR at the corporate level just so I could provide a dozen doughnuts once every 6 weeks and had to prove that every single person in logistics that were partaking of said donuts was involved and had to buy on a schedule so there was total parity and no quid pro quo.
damnit said @ 5:39pm GMT on 20th Apr [Score:1 Insightful]
Love & Other Drugs, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0758752/, despite being a romantic comedy, gives a realistic account on how drug reps work.
damnit said @ 5:39pm GMT on 20th Apr
Also, so much Anne Hathaway nekkidness.
midden said @ 1:33pm GMT on 20th Apr
It looks like my doctor was given lunch twice, once each by two different companies. They both were less than $20, so I'm guessing they walked across the street to the deli. It's nice to have the transparency.
Dienes said @ 3:22pm GMT on 20th Apr
When I worked in a hospital, we constantly had reps bringing in food, far more than the doctor could eat, or would eat. Sandwiches, fruit trays, sundae or burrito buffets, bagel. As a student, it was AWESOME.

My PCP apparently got several $100+ meals this year. That's distressing.
taeyn said @ 3:57pm GMT on 20th Apr
$48 in 2013 for my Primary Care guy. Better than I expected. He eats cheap, apparently.
buzhidao said @ 9:35pm GMT on 20th Apr
in med school i rotated at a family practice doc who had a sponsored lunch every damn day. i dont know how he managed it. it also really sucked cause then lunch was always listening to some pitch and no real free time at all.
hooray for pathology! nobody gives us nothin. it's a huge perk to be left the fuck alone.

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