And last year we found an association between payments and higher rates of brand-name prescribing, on average.
Today’s issue of JAMA is devoted to conflicts of interest in medicine and includes a viewpoint on what ProPublica has learned by publishing Dollars for Docs and a related tool called Prescriber Checkup, which compares doctors to their peers based on how they prescribe drugs in Medicare.
The teaching hospital study focused on 19 centers in five states that restricted visits by drug reps in one or more ways: limiting access, limiting gifts or punishing those who broke the rules. Larkin’s team compared prescriptions by 2,126 doctors at those hospitals with 24,593 peers with similar characteristics who were not subject to the marketing limits. It examined more than 16 million prescriptions in total, using data from CVS Caremark, a large pharmacy benefit manager.
The researchers found significant changes in six of the eight drug classes studied and at nine of the 19 hospitals reviewed. The policies were put in place at different times from 2006 to 2011, but changes in prescribing started immediately and lasted for 12 to 36 months afterward.
