U.S. Doctors Received Industry Payments of $12.13 Billion From 2013 to 2022

FRIDAY, March 29, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- U.S. physicians received $12.13 billion from industry from 2013 to 2022, according to a research letter published online March 28 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Ahmed Sayed, M.B.B.S., from Ain Shams University in Cairo, and colleagues examined the distribution of payments within and across specialties and the medical products associated with the largest total payments using data from the Open Payments platform from 2013 to 2022. Between-specialty variation in industry payments to physicians was characterized by determining the total amount of payments from industry to physicians across 39 specialties.

The researchers found that 85,087,744 payments with a total value of $12.13 billion were made by industry from 2013 to 2022 to 1,445,944 eligible physicians (57.1 percent received payments; median payment, $48 per physician); 93.8 percent of these payments were associated with one or more marketed medical products. The greatest sum of payment was received by orthopedic surgeons ($1.36 billion), followed by neurologists and psychiatrists ($1.32 billion) and cardiologists ($1.29 billion). The lowest sum of payments was received by pediatric surgeons and trauma surgeons ($2.89 and $6.96 million, respectively). Payment distributions were skewed within each specialty, with payments to the median physician ranging from $0 to $2,339, while the mean amount paid to the top 0.1 percent of physicians ranged from $194,933 to $4,826,944 for hospitalists and orthopedic surgeons, respectively.

"More than half of physicians received at least one payment," the authors write. "Payments varied widely between specialties and between physicians within the same specialty."

One author disclosed ties to Arnold Ventures and served as an expert witness against Biogen.

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