Drug firms' payments to doctors should be tracked nationally, one movement argues
Late in September, Ontario introduced legislation that would create a provincial registry documenting payments, gifts, and other benefits drug companies offer to prescribers. Weeks afterward, British Columbia’s health minister suggested they’re looking into it. They’re historic steps for Canada — but one group says they’re not enough.
“What Canada really needs is a publicly accessible national registry of such payments, similar to the one in the United States,” said a group of medical experts representing Open Pharma, a national campaign that seeks to make all industry payments made to individual prescribers public.
In a think piece published on STAT, they noted that transparency is needed to reveal any possible source of bias, conscious or not. “[W]hile the rationale for such transparency is universal across the country, it runs the risk of being embraced in typically uneven Canadian fashion,” the authors said.
Various reports have revealed how pharmaceutical firms provide meals, direct payments, and other benefits to doctors, with the intention of influencing the prescriptions the physicians make. And according to the representatives of Open Pharma, doctors may be influenced to recommend more expensive medications even when they’re not appropriate.
“[I]t is important to track national spending on marketing so we can test the claims made by pharmaceutical companies that high drug prices are needed to support research and development,” they said. “To do so properly, we need information from across the country, not just from one or two provinces.”
Aside from the risk of different provincial registries collecting different types of data, maintaining separate registries for each jurisdiction also results in added administrative costs compared to running just one database. Similar to how the states in the US have come up with an online database of physician gifts and payments, the authors said, Canadian jurisdictions should be able to decide on a common approach to a national registry.
“The Canadian federal government could also work with the provinces and territories,” they added, noting that such a change would be supported by various groups, including the Canadian Medical Association, the College of Family Physicians of Canada, and certain pharmaceutical companies.
“The Trudeau government campaigned on the principles of openness and transparency. With the release of the new health mandate letter, which referenced ‘increasing transparency in the marketing and promotion of therapies,’ there may indeed be cause for optimism,” the authors said. “But just to be sure, we are calling on the federal government to make a national sunshine act an item for discussion at this month’s meeting of federal, provincial, and territorial ministers of health.”
Related stories:
Employer-funded private insurance plans wasted billions on drugs: report
Excess med spending in Canada is pouring billions down the drain
“What Canada really needs is a publicly accessible national registry of such payments, similar to the one in the United States,” said a group of medical experts representing Open Pharma, a national campaign that seeks to make all industry payments made to individual prescribers public.
In a think piece published on STAT, they noted that transparency is needed to reveal any possible source of bias, conscious or not. “[W]hile the rationale for such transparency is universal across the country, it runs the risk of being embraced in typically uneven Canadian fashion,” the authors said.
Various reports have revealed how pharmaceutical firms provide meals, direct payments, and other benefits to doctors, with the intention of influencing the prescriptions the physicians make. And according to the representatives of Open Pharma, doctors may be influenced to recommend more expensive medications even when they’re not appropriate.
“[I]t is important to track national spending on marketing so we can test the claims made by pharmaceutical companies that high drug prices are needed to support research and development,” they said. “To do so properly, we need information from across the country, not just from one or two provinces.”
Aside from the risk of different provincial registries collecting different types of data, maintaining separate registries for each jurisdiction also results in added administrative costs compared to running just one database. Similar to how the states in the US have come up with an online database of physician gifts and payments, the authors said, Canadian jurisdictions should be able to decide on a common approach to a national registry.
“The Canadian federal government could also work with the provinces and territories,” they added, noting that such a change would be supported by various groups, including the Canadian Medical Association, the College of Family Physicians of Canada, and certain pharmaceutical companies.
“The Trudeau government campaigned on the principles of openness and transparency. With the release of the new health mandate letter, which referenced ‘increasing transparency in the marketing and promotion of therapies,’ there may indeed be cause for optimism,” the authors said. “But just to be sure, we are calling on the federal government to make a national sunshine act an item for discussion at this month’s meeting of federal, provincial, and territorial ministers of health.”
Related stories:
Employer-funded private insurance plans wasted billions on drugs: report
Excess med spending in Canada is pouring billions down the drain
