Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16154

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

Wang SS.
Eli Lilly’s Payments to Doctors Revealed
The Wall Street Journal Blog 2009 Jul 31
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/07/31/eli-lillys-payments-to-doctors-revealed/

Full text:

Which docs are getting paid by Eli Lilly? To find out, check out the company’s new “faculty registry”. It’s a list of payments to all the doctors who served as consultants in the first quarter of this year.

In just the first three months of the year, Lilly paid out $22 million to these doctors, according to our colleagues at Dow Jones Market Talk who did the math. The list, released for the first time today, is part of the company’s efforts to increase transparency, according to Lilly.

Like other drug makers, Lilly has made attempts to be more transparent as ties between pharmaceutical companies and doctors have faced increasing scrutiny from Congress, states and medical institutions. Pfizer, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline have also said they are going to disclose payments to doctors.

In 2007, Lilly began disclosing its grants to nonprofits, academic institutions and for-profit educational companies. And, last September, Lilly said that it would start reporting to payments to individual docs as well as part of its efforts to increase transparency.

When several device makers were forced to begin disclosing doc payments as part of a settlement, they revealed that over 40 consultants made over $1 million each. Lilly caps its consultant payments at $75,000 per year.