The study argued that CMS should broaden its reporting requirements of the Sunshine Act to include all hospitals to promote transparency and prevent "inappropriate industry influence."
Biomedical companies sent $832 million in nonresearch payments to teaching hospitals in 2018, according to a study published in Health Affairs Tuesday afternoon.
Just over 90% of teaching hospitals received royalty payments as well as "substantial payments" for gifts and education from biomedical companies, the study found, which "raise concerns for institutional conflicts of interest."
The total payment amount represented more than 46,000 payments by nearly 530 organizations, nearly half of which were medical device companies. The median value of payments received by teaching hospitals was just over $20,000.
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However, the study noted that there were significant outliers, including one teaching hospital that received a royalty payment of $462 million, which represented 55% of the total payments made to teaching hospitals that year.
The study argued that Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) should broaden its reporting requirements of the 2010 Physician Payments Sunshine Act to include all hospitals to promote transparency and prevent "inappropriate industry influence."
Lead author Timothy Anderson, an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in the division of general medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, wrote that the Sunshine Act "requires biomedical companies to report payments made to physicians and teaching hospitals" to CMS.
In 2018, teaching hospitals only accounted for 11% of hospitals participating in Medicare.
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"These findings provide insight into a common but underrecognized financial relationship, which should inform future efforts to mitigate institutional conflicts of interest and strengthen the Open Payments program to meet its stated goals of encouraging transparency and preventing inappropriate influence on research, education, and clinical decision making," the report stated.
The study also found certain predictors for which teaching hospitals received more than $100,000 in royalty payments from biomedical companies.
Among ownership classification, government-owned hospitals led the way, accounting for 26.2% of recipients; followed by "other" owned hospitals at 24.3%, nonprofit hospitals at 20%, and for-profit hospitals at 5.2%.
Teaching hospitals with more than 500 beds accounted for nearly 44% of organizations that received more than $100,000 in payments, while medical schools with major affiliations accounted for nearly 30% of payments received.
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Jack O'Brien is the Content Team Lead and Finance Editor at HealthLeaders, an HCPro brand.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The median value of payments received by teaching hospitals was just over $20,000.
In 2018, teaching hospitals only accounted for 11% of hospitals participating in Medicare.