Updated June 30, 2015
A federal law requires that all financial relationships between drug and medical device companies and doctors or teaching hospitals be shared with the public on a government website. Anyone can this website to see if their doctor or teaching hospital has received such payments or other items of value.
This law is officially called the "National Physician Payment Transparency Program" or "Open Payments" and is part of the Affordable Care Act. It is more popularly known as the “Sunshine Act.”
The database includes information entered by companies about payments and research grants they made to individual doctors or dentists, or to teaching hospitals. It was first published in fall 2014 with data from part of calendar year 2013. In June 2015 it was updated to include data from all of calendar year 2014.
If your doctor is listed in the database, you should feel free to ask them about their interaction with industry. If they are a U-M doctor, they are subject to our strict policies and annual reporting of interactions with industry, as well as the University's strict requirements for performing any industry-sponsored research they may do.
We encourage our physicians to partner with industry to create innovative medical treatments through research. You can feel confident that we have put in place limits that aim to protect you and all patients from the effects of undue industry influence on the care you receive or the clinical research you participate in.
In every interaction we have with industry, and in every policy we have adopted, we seek to foster appropriate industry relationships that support our clinical, educational, and research missions -- while ensuring that our patient care and research are not influenced by industry bias, and that our students receive fair and balanced education.
UMHS welcomes this new form of transparency, which is in the same spirit as the many forward-thinking policies we have put in place to govern the interactions our institution and faculty/staff have with industry.
You can read more about these policies at umhealth.me/ind-int, or view a one-page fact sheet about them in PDF format. You can also find out more about the university’s standards for accepting research funding from industry.
More information about data for UMHS submitted by companies to the federal database for calendar year 2014:
For the U-M Health System as a teaching hospital, industry reported payments and research grants totaling about $25.6 million in the reporting time period. Nearly $21 million of this was in the form of research grants, which are governed by strict U-M guidelines for industry-funded research.
The other $4.7 million was largely royalties paid to U-M as part of licenses granted to companies to commercialize inventions made by U-M medical researchers. It also included unrestricted funding for educational activities, charitable contributions, fees paid for consulting services that UMHS-affiliated individuals provided to industry, and other items that industry identified generally as “grants”.
To date we are not aware of any payments reported in the Open Payments database that are not in line with our policies, though we will continue to examine the data.
We will continue to review new data as they are posted to this site in future, and we continue to refine and enhance our policies and educate our faculty/staff about them to avoid inappropriate industry relationships at UMHS.
It’s important to note that the category of payment chosen by a company when entering a payment into the database may not accurately match the nature of the payment.
For instance, we do not allow our faculty or staff to accept “gifts” from industry, but the value of a newsletter or product information sent by industry to our doctors may have been labeled as a “gift” by industry if the payment does not fit another category. We do not control what category the company chooses, and the Open Payments database does not provide enough information about the nature of the payment for us to easily determine what the item is.