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In 2013, the “Sunshine Act” mandated that all pharmaceutical company payments or gifts to physicians greater than US$10 in value be made public. It turns out that about two thirds of all U.S. physicians are on the receiving end of this largesse, for a total value exceeding $2 billion in 2018. The granularity of the resulting “Open Payments” data set has been a bonanza for researchers drawn to explore the old question of whether gifts and payments influence prescribing patterns.
To compile a systematic review on this topic, researchers culled, from thousands of Medline articles, 36 studies whose methodology was relatively free from bias. All but one were written after 2015, and most correlated Medicare prescribing data with Open Payments data…