The sun is coming up – in 2014 the Sunshine Act will further illuminate just how much money is being hemorrhaged in healthcare to support the profit motives of pharmaceutical and device providers. However, increased transparency has become more prevalent – including a few companies posting grant award registries to their websites. These 14 companies, and their distribution of funds in 2010, are the focus of this brief report in JAMA.
Considering this is just a subset of a little more than half the top drug companies in sales from 2010, the numbers are more than a little staggering: $657M distributed, with over $100M from Roche/Genentech alone. Medical communication companies received 26%, followed by academic medical centers with 21%, then disease-targeted advocacy organizations with 15%. But, this report focuses only on the MCCs – considering their role in knowledge translation to the average clinician and consumer.
The largest beneficiary/offender? Medscape/WebMD. $20M in grant awards from just this subset of 14 drug companies – suggesting pharmaceutical corporation “donations” represent a significant portion of their $500M annual revenue. It might be most appropriate to label every news post on their site as “sponsored content” or “special advertising section”. This brief report further evaluates the privacy policies of these MCCs, and determines physician behavior collected by their sites is likely redistributed for profit back to various industry players.
Pharmaceutical and device manufacturers are not charities. Executives from these companies, despite what their public relations department would have you believe, are not sitting in strategy meetings discussing altruistic giving for the good of health. These financial outlays are investments in marketshare and mindshare, and ought to be viewed for what they are – corrupting influences contributing to the degradation of cost-effective care.
“Medical Communication Companies and Industry Grants”