Drug Companies Paid Doctors to Write Opioid Prescriptions, Documents Reveal

Law enforcement officials used it to investigate drug company marketing, drug companies looked up their competitors and doctors searched for themselves.

A trove of recently released documents offers the public an unvarnished look inside those relationships from the perspective of drug companies themselves.

Back in 2010, we found that hundreds of doctors paid by drug companies to promote their drugs had been accused of professional misconduct, were disciplined by state boards or lacked credentials as researchers or specialists.

In the message, the director notes that what ProPublica found - Cephalon had paid doctors who had been sanctioned by their states to deliver promotional talks on its behalf - was true, and that the company was undertaking a review of all of its doctors in light of our findings.

The document trove also shows firsthand how drug companies targeted doctors and used information purchased from data brokers to rank them and gain insight into how many of their drugs each doctor prescribed each week.

The documents also showed how closely Covidien measured the performance of drug reps in getting doctors to prescribe their drugs.

Still, searching through these documents reinforced my view of how important it is for patients to know about their doctors' relationships with drug companies and talk directly to their doctors about the drugs they are prescribed.

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/drug-companies-opioid-crisis-dollars-for-docs/