With Drug Reps Kept At Bay, Doctors Prescribe More Judiciously

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This story originally published by ProPublica

by Charles Ornstein ProPublica, May 2, 2017, 11 a.m.

When teaching hospitals put pharmaceutical sales representatives on a shorter leash, their doctors tended to order fewer promoted brand-name drugs and used more generic versions instead, a study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows.

The results were significant compared to doctors who did not work at hospitals that limited sales reps from freely walking their halls or providing meals or gifts, according to research by Ian Larkin, an assistant professor of strategy at the University of California, Los Angeles Anderson School of Management, and colleagues.

Conflicts of interest in medicine have been ubiquitous for many years, but a string of lawsuits, coupled with a crackdown by academic medical centers and public disclosure of industry payments, have brought renewed focus on how these relationships affect prescribing.

For the past 6 1/2 years, ProPublica has tracked payments to doctors, building a tool called Dollars for Docs to let users look up their physicians and sort information in various ways. We’ve found that some practitioners earn hundreds of thousands of dollars or more each year working with drug and device companies. We’ve reported how the drugs most aggressively promoted to doctors typically aren’t cures or even big medical breakthroughs.