Quantifying Industry Spending on Promotional Events Using Open Payments Data

Area of Science:

• Health Economics
• Pharmaceutical Marketing
• Medical Device Industry

Background:

• Pharmaceutical and medical device companies heavily sponsor promotional events for healthcare professionals.
• Limited transparency exists regarding the financial scope and scale of this industry spending.
• Understanding this spending is crucial for evaluating its influence on clinical practice.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a novel methodology for quantifying spending by US pharmaceutical and medical companies on industry-sponsored promotional events.
• To describe the scope and characteristics of these sponsored events.
• To enhance transparency in pharmaceutical and medical device marketing expenditures.

Main Methods:

• A cross-sectional study utilized the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid's Open Payments database (2022).
• An event-centric approach grouped payment records to define and characterize sponsored events (e.g., value, attendees).
• The method was tested by calculating event types and spending across professional groups and validated against nurse practitioner association data.

Main Results:

• Over 1.15 million industry-sponsored events were identified in 2022.
• The vast majority (99.7%) had fewer than 20 attendees, with 80% categorized as lunches.
• An event-centric analysis showed a 74% match rate with independently advertised events, validating the method.

Conclusions:

• An event-centric analysis of Open Payments data is a valid approach to assess industry-sponsored event spending.
• This method enhances understanding of the scope and quantification of pharmaceutical and medical device marketing expenditures.
• Expanded reporting requirements are recommended to capture all payments and improve accuracy in estimating the true extent of sponsored events.