Building a picture of drug companies’ payments to doctors

We’re probably all in favour of transparency about the payments that drug companies make to doctors. Protecting the healthcare industry from real or perceived conflicts of interest sounds great. And that’s exactly what the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) hopes to do with their proposed new regulations. These would require manufacturers and commercial suppliers of medicines to publish data on their payments to the healthcare sector.

We at CFPD are concerned, however. We’re worried that the regulations might only result in limited transparency because of some simple, avoidable data issues. Here’s why:

1. The consultation suggests that each company would publish payment data on its own website.

2. The consultation doesn’t mention a ‘data standard’ - rules to ensure the format of the data is consistent across publishers.

Together, these would result in ‘data fragmentation’. Imagine each pharmaceutical company’s payment data is a jigsaw piece which can slot together with the rest to form a comprehensive picture of payments to the healthcare industry. Under current plans, these pieces would be spread far and wide across the internet, rather than together in one ‘puzzle box’. And they would have been stamped out by slightly different machines, making them tricky to fit together.

Fragmented data stops you from seeing the big picture, and that’s the real thing of value. You need to put the puzzle together to find all payments made to a particular doctor, track payment trends across the industry, or build public search tools for payments data like the US’s OpenPayments project. 

Happily, this is pretty easy to fix without increasing burdens on the companies involved. We recommend that DHSC create:

1. A centrally maintained repository (or puzzle box) of the published datasets’ URLs, or of the data itself if resources allow.

2. A mandatory data standard (or stamping machine) - the rules on what the data should contain and the technical format in which it should be published.

We think it’s important to look at this now, rather than later when the data will be harder to unify. The Government is increasingly raising key questions about data early in the regulatory process - for example, a recent consultation on housing includes a discussion of data standards. This is brilliant because it streamlines policymaking and strengthens the resultant policy.

We’ve sent this feedback to DHSC and hope they’ll consider it in their consultation response. Read our briefing note to learn more and please get in touch at contact@centreforpublicdata.org if you’d like to discuss the topic further.