Consultation starts on how to reveal payments from industry to doctors

A consultation has been launched on the best way to disclose payments made by the drug industry to individual doctors or to other health professionals in the United Kingdom. The likely outcome is a single searchable database, accessible to all, that would list all payments made for whatever purpose and would name the recipients.

Payments would include funding for clinical trials; fees for advice, consultancy, lectures, and educational activity; and the costs of foreign trips to conferences, for example. The drug industry has already announced its intention to disclose the total amounts paid and the number of healthcare professionals who benefited, beginning this spring. …