The Sunshine Act and oncology: Lessons learned from urology

The Physician Payment Sunshine Act was enacted to increase the transparency of financial relationships between physicians and the pharmaceutical industry. These financial relationships are prevalent in the field of oncology, as they are in other fields of medicine. We explored the relationship between industry and urologists for compensations associated with the treatment of urologic malignancies.

The publicly available Open Payments database was obtained from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. We performed a descriptive analysis of payments made to urologists for drugs associated with urologic malignancies.

In total, 44,334 payments, summing to $ 4,638,856, were made to 5,666 urologists for drugs used to treat urologic cancers. The median payment per transaction was $14, and most (74.3%) were £ $20. Of the transactions, 39,368 (88.8%) were associated with drugs for prostate cancer, 3,475 (7.8%) for bladder cancer, and 1,491 (3.4%) for kidney cancer. Most payments were made the form of food or beverage (89%), equating to $826,667.

For urologists, industry payments associated with cancer treatment are prevalent. Treatments for prostate cancer are associated with the most financial relationships, followed by bladder cancer and kidney cancer. Payments are small in amount, and are commonly in the form of food or beverage.