Although a majority of psychiatrists received at least one non-research payment from the pharmaceutical and medical device industry between 2015 and 2021, the bulk of these payments went to a tiny fraction of psychiatrists, according to a study published today in Psychiatric Services.
“Of note, psychiatry’s industry payment problem is relatively narrow in scope compared with industry payment patterns in other specialties,” wrote John L. Havlik, M.D., M.B.A., of Stanford University, and colleagues. “Federal-level efforts to target inappropriate physician payments from industry may do well to focus on the psychiatrists who make $10,000 or more from industry each year—a group comprising fewer than a dozen psychiatrists per state—rather than spending valuable resources on less targeted interventions.”
The authors analyzed non-research industry payments—including travel fees, consulting fees, meals, and gifts—to 56,955 psychiatrists between 2015 and 2021 using the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Open Payments Database (OPD). The OPD was created in 2010 under the Physician Payments Sunshine Act.
They found that during this study period, psychiatrists received 2,600,264 industry payments totaling $357,971,774. A total of 42,713 psychiatrists (75.0%) received at least one payment between 2015 and 2021. But the distribution was highly unequal: The top 10% of psychiatrists (N=4,271) received a median of $11,459.41, accounting for 93.6% of all industry payments, while the top 1% received a median of $362,631, accounting for 74.7% of all payments.
Havlik and colleagues also found:
- Psychiatrists who were among the top 1% in the amount of industry payments received were significantly more likely to be primarily licensed in Florida, Ohio, Oklahoma, or Texas than elsewhere in the nation.
- Food and beverage accounted for the largest number of payments made to psychiatrists (86.9%), although consulting (5.4% of payments) accounted for the largest dollar amount ($269,027,560), followed by food and beverage ($50,439,781).
- The median psychiatrist received substantially less compensation from industry than did other specialists. In 2019, the median cardiologist received $725 in industry compensation and the median dermatologist received $414, compared with $166.38 for the median psychiatrist.
“Further research is warranted to explore the prescribing behaviors of psychiatrists who receive larger payments compared with the prescribing behaviors of those who receive smaller payments, as well as patterns of prescription by these highly concentrated industry-susceptible psychiatrists,” the authors wrote.
For related information, see the Psychiatric News article “Integrity Is Built Into the Process of Developing DSM-5-TR.”
(Image: Getty Images/iStock/skynesher)
Don't miss out! To learn about newly posted articles in Psychiatric News, please sign up here.