It’s long been known that financial links to industry may influence a clinician’s behaviour, but a new study reveals a more nuanced relationship between the pattern of payments received and oncologists’ prescribing.
Clinicians who have long-term links with a pharma company and those who receive payments for ‘consulting’ rather than just ‘wine and dine’ educational meetings are mostly likely to be swayed in their prescribing, according to US research.
But surprisingly, the association between payments and prescribing did not appear to be modified by an institution’s Conflict of Interest policies, a study published in The Oncologist found.
Researchers at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York used the Open Payments database to analyse the size, duration and type of drug company financial payments made to 2766 oncologists.
Overall, almost 70% of oncologists received some kind of payment over a three year period, with the most common being financial support to attend education meetings (26-56% depending on cancer type). A smaller proportion of oncologists (5-12%) received compensation payments for consultancy, speaker fees and travel.
For oncologists who received industry payments continually for three years there was a significant increase in their prescribing of the sponsor’s lung cancer drugs (Relative Risk 1.69; afatinib, erlotinibm, compared to no payments), renal cell cancer (RR 1.81; axitinib, everolimus, pazopanib, sorafenib and sunitinib ) and chronic myeloid leukaemia (RR 1.22; dasatinib, imatinib, nilotinib).
However there was no significant increase in prescribing for oncologists who received intermittent industry payments for only one or two years. The strength of the payment-prescribing association did not vary by type of institution or their Conflict of Interest policies, but was stronger for oncologists who accepted higher value payments of more than US$100 annually compared to those who did not.