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Abstract
Objectives To evaluate the extent and trends of personal payments from pharmaceutical companies to cardiologists board-certified by the Japanese Circulation Society.
Design A retrospective analysis study using data from a publicly available database.
Setting The study focused on payments to cardiologists in Japan.
Participants All 15 048 cardiologists who were board-certified by the Japanese Circulation Society as of 2021.
Primary and secondary outcome measures The primary outcome was the extent of personal payments to cardiologists in 2016–19. Secondary outcomes included the analysis of trends in these payments over the same period.
Results Of all 15 048 board-certified cardiologists, 9858 (65.5%) received personal payments totaling $112 934 503 entailing 165 013 transactions in 2016–19. The median payment per cardiologist was $2947 (IQR, $1022–$8787), with a mean of $11 456 (SD, $35 876). The Gini Index was 0.840, indicating a high concentration of payments to a small number of cardiologists. The top 1%, 5% and 10% of cardiologists received 31.6%, 59.4% and 73.5% of all payments, respectively. There were no significant trends in the number of cardiologists receiving payments or number of payments per cardiologist during the study period.
Conclusions More than 65% of Japanese cardiologists received personal payments from pharmaceutical companies over the 4-year study period. Although the payment amount was relatively small for the majority of cardiologists, a small number of cardiologists received the vast majority of the payments.
- CARDIOLOGY
- ETHICS (see Medical Ethics)
- MEDICAL ETHICS
- Health policy
Data availability statement
Data are available upon reasonable request. All data used in this study is available from Yen For Docs database run by Medical Governance Research Institute (https://yenfordocs.jp/) and each pharmaceutical companies belonging to the Japan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association. The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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Data availability statement
Data are available upon reasonable request. All data used in this study is available from Yen For Docs database run by Medical Governance Research Institute (https://yenfordocs.jp/) and each pharmaceutical companies belonging to the Japan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association. The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Footnotes
Contributors AM contributed to data collection, resource, software, formal analysis, visualisation, supervision and study administration. All authors (AM, KH and YS) contributed to study conceptualisation, methodology, writing the original draft and reviewing the draft. AM is the guarantor of this study, accepts full responsibility for the work and/or the conduct of the study, had access to the data and controlled the decision to publish. During the preparation of this work, the authors used ChatGPT version 4.0 to check and correct grammatical and spelling errors. After using this tool, the authors carefully reviewed and edited the content as needed and take full responsibility for the content of the publication.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient and public involvement Patients and/or the public were not involved in the design, or conduct, or reporting, or dissemination plans of this research.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.