This should be interesting...

New rules that mandate reporting of all physician payments from drug and device manufacturers should be out soon. I favor this transparency, provided the information is detailed and accurate. For example, receiving money from a company for doing a valid research study on one of their products is a bit different than receiving money to travel around the country on a speaker’s bureau. Let’s hope the publicly available data includes information about the reason for the payment, and the recipient of the payment (e.g. the medical school, to support Dr. X’s research study, or directly to Dr. X).

It will also be interesting to see if makers of diagnostic devices will be included—clearly the makers of devices that touch or are inserted into patients will be required to report payments, but it isn’t clear to me if the same holds true for makers of new diagnostic tests. As we’ve discussed before in this blog, such transparency is also extremely important.