Physician-Industry Interactions and Anti–Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor Use Among US Ophthalmologists

Abstract

The publication of the US Physician Payments Sunshine Act provides insight into the financial relationship between physicians and the pharmaceutical industry. This added transparency creates new opportunities of using objective data to better understand prior research that implicates pharmaceutical promotions as an important factor in a physician's decision-making process.OBJECTIVE To assess the association between reported industry payments and physician-prescribing habits by comparing the use of anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) intravitreal injections by US ophthalmologists to the industry payments these same physicians received.

The lack of a relationship between physician payments from drug manufacturers and Medicare claims for abiraterone and enzalutamide

“…This may explain why the current study produced disparate results for median prescription counts but detected some effect in outlier analyses (ie, enzalutamide regression and quantile analysis). This is consistent with another study that similarly performed correlation analyses on antivascular endothelial growth factor drugs in patients with neovascular eye disease . Together, all 3 studies suggest that there is an association among outliers; however, it is less clear whether token dollar values centered on median values significantly influence prescriber behavior .…”

“…The results of the current study demonstrate that there was no difference in prescription counts between Open Payments recipients and nonrecipients. This is in contrast to recent analyses that have suggested a positive relationship between payments and prescription patterns using similar databases . One study evaluated the ratio of prescriptions comparing brand‐name drugs versus generics in statins, beta blockers, angiotensin‐converting enzyme inhibitors, and angiotensin receptor blockers .…”

“…However, it is unlikely that the small time difference between the 2 databases would affect behavior significantly. In contrast, 2 other studies used semiconcurrent databases from 2013 . Despite the advantages of using same‐year data, we elected against using 2013 Open Payments data due to the low validation rate for that year and difficulties in comparing half‐year Open Payments data with full‐year Medicare Part D data.…”

“…Opinions are varied regarding the effect of industry payments on prescription patterns, including no effect, a binary effect, or a linear effect. [9][10][11] In 2010, as a part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services (CMS) announced its intention to release data regarding industry payments to physicians, which has since generated >1200 indexed publications between 2010 and 2015. 12 The first data release took place in the second one-half of 2013, and the first full year of data became available in 2014.…”

The role of industry influence in sinus balloon dilation: Trends over time

“…Increased contact with and payment from industries may lead to increased physician loyalty to particular brands of new technologies and manifest itself as increased utilization of industry products. Several studies have demonstrated that increasing usage of new medications and technologies is associated with increasing industry payments across medical subspecialties . Particularly for new technologies such as BD, close contact with industry representatives may be required to better understand and apply the technology.…”