How money from corporations is influencing doctors.

Dr. Jon W. Draud, the medical director of psychiatric and addiction medicine at two Tennessee hospitals, pursues some eclectic passions. He’s bred sleek Basenji hunting dogs for show. And last summer, the Tennessee State Museum featured “African Art: The Collection of Jon Draud.”

But the Nashville psychiatrist is also notable for a professional pursuit: During the last four years, the 47-year-old Draud has earned more than $1 million for delivering promotional talks and consulting for seven drug companies.

By a wide margin, Draud’s earnings make him the best-paid speaker in ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs database, which has been updated to include more than $2 billion in payments from 15 drugmakers for promotional speaking, research, consulting, travel, meals and related expenses from 2009 to 2012.
Payouts to hundreds of thousands physicians are now included.

Draud is not the only high earner: 21 other doctors have made more than $500,000 since 2009 giving talks and consulting for drugmakers, the database shows. And half of the top earners are from a single specialty: psychiatry.

“It boggles my mind,” said Dr. James H. Scully Jr., chief executive of the American Psychiatric Association, referring to the big money paid to some psychiatrists for what are billed as educational talks.

Paid speaking “is perfectly legal, and if people want to work for drug companies, this is America,” said Scully, whose specialty has often been criticized for its over-reliance on medications. “But everybody needs to be clear — this is marketing.”

When Dollars for Docs launched in 2010, it gave the first comprehensive look at the money that drug companies spend to enlist doctors as a sales force. The new data show how payouts to psychiatrists like Draud and other doctors have added up over time. And they underscore the key role physicians play for drugmaker profits even as scrutiny and criticism of such payments grows.

The companies say physician speakers are the best messengers to teach their peers about new and effective treatments. But critics counter that the speakers are little more than highly credentialed pitchmen who typically use the drug companies’ slides and talking points to sell rather than educate.

Attention to the issue has prompted prominent medical schools to tighten rules on faculty acceptance of drug company money for such talks. Questions about undue industry influence also have bedeviled medical journals and professional groups representing physician specialists.

Susan Chimonas, a research scholar at the Center on Medicine as a Profession at Columbia University, said many medical centers that regulate interactions between drug companies and their doctors would be “alarmed” by the high tallies in the updated Dollars for Docs.

“How do these folks have time to do their real jobs if they’re speaking so much?” Chimonas said. Hospital administrators, she predicted, would be “concerned not only about the conflict of interest, but also the conflict of commitment.”

Draud’s $1 million in drug company earnings is probably a minimum figure. Some of the seven companies he represented have reported their payouts for only a short time. And Draud has separately disclosed ties with at least four additional companies that haven’t revealed how much they pay speakers.

Draud has friends among the other highest-paid doctors in the database. He teaches continuing medical education courses with fellow psychiatrists Rakesh Jain and Vladimir Maletic. Jain, of Lake Jackson, Texas, has earned $582,049. Maletic, of Greer, S.C., made $527,850 , according to Dollars for Docs. Both also speak for other companies that keep their payments private.

Dollars for Docs took transparency a step further by putting the available payment disclosures in one place and making them easy to search.

In 2010, many universities and teaching hospitals were surprised to find that their faculty members were engaged in promotional speaking. ProPublica compared the faculty lists of institutions with conflict-of-interest policies barring such speaking with the database and found a number of physicians in violation.

Drug firms, too, learned of problems with their chosen speakers. ProPublica found their rosters peppered with some physicians who had serious disciplinary actions against their medical licenses.
Both the drug companies and academia tightened their policies.

Only a handful of doctors who were among the 20 highest-paid in 2010 have maintained their level of income from speaking, the new data show.

Ten of the doctors dropped from making about $100,000 a year to less than $20,000 in 2012. Some doctors whose payments declined spoke about drugs the companies are no longer pushing. Others, like prominent cancer expert David Rizzieri at Duke University School of Medicine, faced new restrictions from their employers.

Drug companies say their spending often reflects market realities — not a changing opinion on the use of physician speakers. Should a top-selling drug lose its patent, allowing cheaper generics to compete, there’s no impetus to push sales. A new drug or a new approved use for an existing drug, conversely, may prompt a burst of speakers.

New York’s Forest Laboratories, for example, is a fraction the size of its Big Pharma brethren Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Merck. But when it comes to paying doctors to promote its products, the drugmaker has recently dwarfed its rivals.

During the first three quarters of 2012, Forest spent $31 million on doctors who touted the virtues of such drugs as Bystolic for high blood pressure, the antidepressant Viibryd, and Daliresp for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Nine doctors each made nearly $100,000 from Forest in that time alone, the data show.

Pfizer — whose U.S. sales are five times greater than Forest’s — spent a fifth of Forest’s total, paying out $6.2 million to promotional speakers during the same period. AstraZeneca, second to Pfizer in sales, spent $12.2 million.

Forest spokesman Frank Murdolo said in an email that the company spends more on speakers because it doesn’t use pricey direct-to-consumer TV marketing. It also has more new drugs than its competitors, Murdolo said.

In contrast, GlaxoSmithKline spent $52.8 million on speakers in 2010. That fell to $24.1 million in 2011 and $7.6 million in the first three quarters of last year.

Glaxo spokeswoman Mary Anne Rhyne wrote in an email that the company’s spending tracks with new drugs or new uses for existing products. “That activity has been relatively low in the past year, so spending for speaker programs has been lower, too,” she said.

The top recent speaking programs for Glaxo involved Advair, a drug for asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and Jalyn, which treats problems with urination for men with enlarged prostates, Rhyne said.

Glaxo and other top pharmaceutical companies have laid off thousands of workers in the past couple of years as their top drugs have lost patent protections, the pipeline of new drug approvals has slowed and cost pressures arose.

Other companies contacted by ProPublica about their spending would not reveal which products they paid speakers to extol or why.

“We don’t disclose how we allocate our speaker program budget,” Tony Jewell, a spokesman for AstraZeneca, said in an email. AstraZeneca’s spending on promotional speakers decreased from $31.6 million in 2010 to $17.6 million the following year and $12.2 million in the first three quarters of 2012.
http://www.propublica.org/article/dollars-for-docs-mints-a-millionaire