October 2017 April 2015 | Page 8

Te Puawai
are. It is obvious that disclosing conflicts of
interest is not working that well, and that there
is a need to seriously manage them at the
very least. As other presenters repeatedly
pointed out New Zealand is lagging behind in
acknowledging that we have a problem, and
putting in place a robust system of dealing
with what has become an increasing large can
of worms.
Peter Griffin & ProPublica
The next speaker was Peter Griffin, founding
manager of the Science Media Centre and the
founder and editor of Sciblogs.co.nz. He also
writes about technology for the NZ Listener.
He talked about ProPublica, an independent
non-profit newsroom based in New York City
that produces investigative journalism in the
public interest, and described aspects of the
Physician Payment Sunshine Act.
Peter Griffin began by pointing out that in last
five years pharmaceutical companies have
agreed to pay over $US13 billion in fines to
resolve US Department of Justice allegations
of fraudulent marketing practices, including
the promotion of medicines for uses that were
not approved by the FDA. They include:
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Pfizer – $US2.3 billion
Merck – $US950 million
GlaxoSmithKline – $US3 billion
Sanofi-Aventis – $US109 million
Johnson & Johnson $US2.2 billion
Eli Lilly – $US1.42 billion
AstraZeneca – $US520 million
Abbott – $US1.5 billion
Boehringer Ingelheim – $US95 million
Amgen – $US762 million
Endo – $US192.7 million. (5)

Obamacare
He then outlined the situation in the USA
where one of the provisions of the Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act, known as
© Te Puawai

Obamacare, is a mandatory open disclosure
system. The Open Payments database by the
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
(CMS) is a federal public database that was
launched on 30 September 2014 with the
intention of bringing transparency to financial
relationships between doctors and the
pharmaceutical industry. It requires all
manufacturers of drugs, devices, and
biological and medical supplies covered by
federal health care programmes to collect and
track all financial relationships with doctors
and teaching hospitals. The database includes
payments for research, gifts, meals, travel, or
speaker fees.
The Physician Payment Sunshine Act was
first introduced in 2007. It was initially
introduced independently and failed, but it
then became part of the Patient Protection
and Affordable Care Act and was enacted
along with that Act. Although there have been
some initial technical glitches, and the
predictable expressions of outrage from
doctors and researchers, the database is now
up and running. (6)
Dollars for Docs
ProPublica has also launched another
initiative called “Dollars for Docs” in which
patients can log in their doctor’s name and get
information on the money she or he has
received from drug companies. (7) Peter
Griffin pointed out the top 300 doctors getting
the most industry money were all men.
Then there is PharmaShine, which claims to
be the largest data source of its type with
information on over six million individual
payment trans-actions to more than 700,000
health care professionals. (8)
Why NZ needs a Sunshine Act
Professor Cindy Farquhar, co-chair of the

College of Nurses Aotearoa (NZ) Inc
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