No abstract

Background. Oncologists who author clinical practice guidelines frequently have financial relationships with the pharmaceutical industry. It is unknown whether participation on clinical practice guideline committees is associated with differences in the amounts of industry money received. Materials and Methods. We conducted a nested casecontrol study from August 2013-December 2018. We manually abstracted membership records of NCCN Guidelines committees for the 20 most common cancers and linked to Open Payments. The study sample included medical oncologists selected to join an NCCN Guidelines committee ("joiners") during the study period. Joiners were matched 1:2 to medical oncologists who had no participation on NCCN committees (controls) by gender, NCCN institution, and medical school graduation year. We performed difference-in-differences (DiD) estimation to assess whether selection to an NCCN committee was associated with the dollar value of payments received from industry, using generalized estimating equations to address correlation between matched pairs and between repeated observations of the same pair. Results. 54 physicians joined an NCCN Guidelines committee during the study period. These physicians received more payments than matched controls in the year prior to joining