For the past decade psychiatry has taken far more than its share of hits on conflict of interest from both within and outside of the profession. There are any number of bloggers that claim their reason for existence is to keep the profession honest. Needless to say - a smug attitude like that rubs people like me and the majority of my colleagues the wrong way. But I will go beyond that in terms of conflict of interest and have in many posts on this blog. Unlike managed care administrators and US Senators, I believe that even physicians are entitled to be paid for the work that they do. That includes providing CME presentations and doing consulting work - whether or not that includes payment by pharmaceutical companies or medical device manufacturers. The only reason I do not do that, is to keep my name off the corruption list (implicit) that is currently compiled by an agency of the US government. That list is episodically analyzed by consumer agencies who think that they are doing somebody a favor by naming any physician who gets reimbursed by industry. My reasoning is simple - businesses and governments already have a painfully large amount of leverage against physicians - why provide them with more? Especially when it involves a good faith effort on your part and somebody is distorting that effort and doing their best to make it seem like you have done something wrong. More importantly there is the frequent suggestion that a physician is aligned against the interests of their own patients. I don't think that happens, even if a name is on that list.
This decade long campaign to compile the information has resulted in a difficult to decipher database with many errors. It takes time to go through the data and sort it out. It is impossible to try it on a casual basis. It is a full time job. The first of these disclosures came out in July of 2015 from ProPublica. In the article, they looked at the number of days per year that a physician would receive industry payments. They also looked at the top 20 MDs in each state in terms of payments received and in my home state there were no psychiatrists? Wait a minute - weren't psychiatrists maligned in the press at the national level by a US Senator and also at state levels as being frequent recipients of pharmaceutical money? In the most popular post on this blog - I point out that erroneous assumption used by a reporter to criticize the DSM-5 process at the peak of DSM-5 hysteria. In an attempt to suggest that the DSM-5 may be swayed by the fact that the APA received money from the pharmaceutical industry the author fails to point out that the money received was less than half of what another specialty organization received. I pointed out in a separate post that the theory that pharmaceutical company money to physicians is tied to pharmaceutical prices is equally flawed. Taking physicians totally out of the loop results in the most expensive pharmaceuticals in the world in the USA. That suggests that the monetary influence occurs at the level of Congress and not physicians.
The May 2, 2017 edition of JAMA has a conflict of interest theme. Many of the articles are editorials with very predictable conclusions. For the past decade conflict of interest in medicine has been simplified on the one hand in terms of definitions and solutions and politicized on the other. I abstracted the table at the top of this post from one of the data driven articles (1). They analyzed data from the CMS National Plan & Provider Enumeration System (NPPES), a database of all allopathic or osteopathic physicians with a national provider number (NPI). The NPPES records input of all general payments, research payments, and ownership interests of these physicians. General payments were described as all forms of payments (like speaking fees, food, beverages) other than research payments done under a written protocol. The ownership interest was presumably in medical concerns but that was not really specified in the article. The specific listing of specialties is available in the full text of the reference below. My only focus here is on psychiatry. I don't think the rankings or specific amounts have any particular meaning.
The abstracted table lists two of the end points in the article - the percentage of physicians receiving some kind of general payment and the percentage of physicians receiving more that $10,000 per year. The $10,000 amount was flagged by the the US Department of Health and Human Services as representing "significant conflicts of interest". In fact, for most physicians who do consulting - it represents about 2 weeks of work. The news for psychiatry reflected the reality that I am aware of. Psychiatry was mentioned just twice in the article and both of those mentions were in the above highlighted table. None of the headlines from the past decade that psychiatrists were getting more money from pharmaceutical companies than anybody else. A little more than a third of psychiatrists got some kind of general payment with a median value of $171 (median interquartile range of $34 - 442.) For perspective - I purchase 2 or 3 new textbooks a year that typically range $300-400 apiece. I also subscribe to the standard online internal medicine text at a cost of $500/year. I am not saying that the transaction involved textbooks but many do involve educational materials and I am not sure they are not added into this figure.
The second endpoint is the $10,000 figure and psychiatry is lower on this metric with 3.6 % of psychiatrists getting this level of payments. For context, the upper end of the range for these payments is 11-12% for some specialists and the lower end is at about 1%. Proceduralists (surgeons and interventionalists like cardiologists) tended to get the highest level of payments usually due to substantial licensing fees and ownership interests in the industry like medical imaging facilities and surgical facilities.
The authors do not draw many conclusions about the data. They point out that there have been some concerns about accuracy. In their conclusion section they point to other studies about connections between payments and prescribing patterns that suggest a "subconscious bias" in their decision-making. In other words, accept a free lunch and start prescribing the medication of the pharmaceutical rep that bought the lunch. One of the reasons I continue to read these articles is to see if the "subconscious bias" argument has any more evidence to back it up than speculation and rhetoric. I continue to not see very much. I have pointed out the flaws in one of their references in a previous post. In other words there are a number of explanatory factors operating here other than "subconscious bias". I have not seen any Manchurian candidates among my colleagues. Physicians use a lot more discretion in prescribing medications than whether or not somebody bought them a piece of pizza. The easiest way to avoid the brainwashing accusation is to not accept the pizza or payment for an educational presentation. That is what I and two-thirds of my colleagues do. When you are squeaky clean according to the US government/CMS, it is easy to develop an unrealistic idea about yourself - as if this hall of shame approach means anything.
The downside of course is that industry and medical education suffers unless there are incentives out there for physicians to do additional work. If you happen to be a national expert in demand - will you fly back and forth across the country to educate your peers for nothing? Maybe a time or two but not much beyond that. If the pharmaceutical or medical device industry needs consultation from an expert - will you go to a multi-billion dollar a year business and provide your expertise for nothing? There are no academics from any other department in any university that are expected to do that. Another piece of the equation that is never mentioned is how physicians are reimbursed relative to the pharmaceutical industry. An asthma specialist can see a patient once or twice a year and during that time prescribe $4,000 to $6,000 worth of inhalers. That specialist might bill $200-300 for their professional time, but that will be discounted by insurance companies. An argument can be made that physicians are seriously underpaid for managing expensive products and working for the industry is one way around that. In other words - if physicians were paid for all of the high volume work that they do - they may be less interested in outside consultation with industry.
There are additional arguments about conflict of interest that nobody seems to talk about. Physician owned medical facilities are often described as being significant sources of self referral conflict of interest. But what are the advantages of physician ownership? Not being managed by non-physicians would seem to be the clear cut advantage. Would these environments provide higher quality and more professional services? Would they be more likely to treat physicians fairly and cause less burnout? Would they be more likely to be able to provide the full spectrum of services that their patients need? Who has the greater conflict of interest - a physician employee of a managed care company who is paid to ration health care for the company's interest or a physician who owns the business and can provide services based on his or her idea of medical quality? The evidence that these differences exist is widespread.
Finally, how much of this conflict of interest rhetoric focused on physicians is designed to control them and keep them in line? Although there are always qualifiers about this data including its accuracy, the federal government seems to have upped the ante by their description of the $10,000 marker. Is this the 21st century equivalent of billing and coding violations from the 1990s? Those investigations were driven more by politics, convention and rhetoric than any wrongdoing. I can't think of a better example of that than doing $10,000 worth of consulting work and finding out that your name is now on a list produced by the federal government and some media outlet is implying wrong doing or quid pro quo with pharmaceutical companies.
Those are the facts of the list as I see them. There has not been much discussion of the article or the theme of this edition. The data within psychiatry confirms what I have seen and it has never been as shocking to me as it has been typically portrayed either in the media or by groups interested in influencing physicians.
It is not shocking at all.
George Dawson, MD, DFAPA
References:
1: Tringale KR, Marshall D, Mackey TK, Connor M, Murphy JD, Hattangadi-Gluth JA. Types and Distribution of Payments From Industry to Physicians in 2015. JAMA. 2017 May 2;317(17):1774-1784. doi: 10.1001/jama.2017.3091. PubMed PMID: 28464140.
2: JAMA May 2, 2017, Vol 317, No. 17, Pages 1707-1812. This entire issue is about conflict-of-interest and the link is here.
Supplementary 1:
Before sending any inflammatory comments please remember that I don't eat the free lunch or accept industry money from anybody. Feel free to look that up on any list.
Supplementary 2:
Original form of the table. I had to convert it to a graphic version at the top of this post.
Per
Physician Value of General Payments to Allopathic and Osteopathic Physicians by
Specialty in 2015
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Percentage of physicians receiving general
payments
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Percentage of physicians receiving
>$10,000
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1.
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1.
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2.
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2.
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3.
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3.
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4.
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4.
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5.
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5.
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6.
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7.
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7.
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8.
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8.
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9.
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10.
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10.
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11.
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11.
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13.
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14.
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14.
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15.
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15.
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16.
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16.
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17.
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17.
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18. Psychiatry (37.3)
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18.
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19.
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19.
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20.
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20.
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21.
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21. Psychiatry (3.6)
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22.
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22.
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23.
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23.
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24.
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24.
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25.
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25.
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26.
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26.
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Supplementary 3:
Some additional points of interest from other articles in this supplement:
589,042 of 850,000 active physicians in the US received some type of general payment in 2015 with a mean value of $400 and a median value of $138.
Any physician registered at a sponsored CME event is considered to have received a payment whether they consume provided food or beverages or not.
from: Steinbrook R. Physicians, Industry Payments for Food and Beverages, and DrugPrescribing. JAMA. 2017 May 2;317(17):1753-1754. doi: 10.1001/jama.2017.2477. PubMed PMID: 28464155.
The threshold for reporting is a $10 transfer to the physician.
"At the same time, most physicians have essentially no meaningful COI."
from: Lichter AS. Conflict of Interest and the Integrity of the Medical Profession. JAMA. 2017 May 2;317(17):1725-1726. doi: 10.1001/jama.2017.3191. PubMed PMID: 28464163.
