Payment data reported by pharmaceutical companies
To improve transparency in financial relationships between
pharmaceutical companies and healthcare professionals, the Japanese
Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (JPMA), representing of more
than 70 leading pharmaceutical companies, demands its member companies
to disclose payments for lecturing, consulting, and manuscript drafting
made to physicians, including the recipients’ names and affiliations on
their websites, as previously explained[22,23]. However, according
to the JPMA guidance, payment categories, such as meals, travel and
accommodations, and other gifts, are disclosed in aggregated amounts and
could not be analyzed at individual physician level[23,51]. Thus, we
focused on lecturing, consulting, and drafting payments to neurologists
in this study.
We retrieved the names and affiliated hospitals of all board-certified
neurologists from the JSN website. Then, we collected the personal
payments made for lecturing, consulting, and drafting services to these
neurologists by JPMA-affiliated companies from a publicly accessible
payment database from 2016 to 2020[52], as conducted in prior
studies[15-17,20].