corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15251

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Grogan K.
US state puts stricter disclosure rules in place for pharma
Pharma Times 2009 Mar 13
http://www.pharmatimes.com/worldnews/article.aspx?id=15487


Full text:

The State of Massachusetts has passed what it calls “tough new rules” governing sales and marketing practices of pharmaceutical and medical device companies doing business there.

The state’s Public Health Council says that the sweeping new regulations “place Massachusetts at the forefront nationally in monitoring the relationship between industry and health care providers”. It says that they are also the strictest in the USA in mandating reporting and public disclosure of certain fees, payments and other compensation provided by companies to physicians”.

The new rules passed by a vote of 10 to 0 and will take effect on July 1, 2009 – the first public reporting by companies will be due a year from then. Massachusetts is the only state to require disclosure by device makers, as well as drugmakers, and just one of two states to make such disclosures public.

Payment for “entertainment or recreation” is prohibited, under the new regulations, as is cash given to health care providers, “except as compensation for bona fide services”. Financial support by manufacturers to health care practitioners in training is banned, as are items such as pens, mugs, and calendars.

Meals must be “modest, and only provided at a training or educational event”, noted the state Department of Public Health, which noted that the new rules do not cover “genuine research projects and clinical trials”, as well as other “price concessions such as rebates and discounts”. However, “all other payments of $50 or more would need to be disclosed publicly”.

The move by Massachusetts has caused a furore over the past year among some drugmakers who have said that it would deter healthcare professionals in the state’s many academic health centres from working with pharmaceutical research companies. Robert Coughlin, president of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council told the Boston Globe that it is now seen as “the most unfriendly state in the nation toward industry, “adding that “in these tough economic times, you don’t want to send a chilling message to an industry that’s a growth industry.”

DPH Commissioner John Auerbach acknowledged that “these new rules have been the subject of great interest on the part of the general public, health care advocates and the industry.” However he added that “the enormous amount of feedback, and the thorough consideration by the Public Health Council, has resulted in a strict but balanced regulation”.

It will make Massachusetts “a leader in promoting transparency”, he added, but the rules “also recognise the important role that research and clinical trials play in our state and do nothing that will inhibit that important work”.

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909