The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, now a month overdue to issue draft guidelines for reporting pharma-physician contacts as required under healthcare reform legislation, said the department is working on it, but offered nothing in the way of a timeline.
Piercing the veil, but missing the value of medicine’s industry ties
ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs database has grown richer in pharma company payments but falls short in putting context around those expenditures, say industry-side critics.
GSK paid $57 mil. to doctors for speaking and advising in ’10
GlaxoSmithKline said Thursday that it paid more than 5,000 US healthcare professionals a total of $56.8 million last year for promotional talks or serving on advisory boards.
The drug industry must move from a mindset that emphasizes compliance with regulations to one steeped in core values of integrity and transparency if it is to regain the public’s trust, GSK’s Dierdre Connelly said at a conference yesterday.
For the second phase of FDA’s transparency initiative, the agency unveiled 21 draft guidance proposals dealing with increased public disclosure of adverse events reports, drug evaluation procedures, and manufacturing inspections, among several other proposals.
In protecting market research, federal exclusion may not always apply
Thanks to the work of lobbyists, marketing research-related payments are explicitly excluded from Sunshine legislation enacted Tuesday as part of the healthcare overhaul. But the exclusion may not always apply.
WOMMA lays out disclosure guidelines for social media
Social media marketers should make it easy for consumers to consider the source when products are being discussed, according to new disclosure guidelines from the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA).
Pharma marketing research gains tenuous hold in frosty Minnesota
The Minnesota pharmacy board maintained that it’s legal to pay doctors to answer bona fide marketing surveys, but legislation being debated may keep the state a marketing research “dead zone,” said one lobbyist.
On Monday, Merck disclosed fees paid to US-based medical and scientific professionals who spoke at promotional medical education programs during the third quarter of 2009.