Navigating The New Med/Legal Landscape

By Lance Hill

Imagine you are a physician, and you are concerned about the forthcoming public visibility that will be driven by the Sunshine Act. In the past, you worked with manufacturers on early-stage compounds to assist in the drug development process. Primarily, this was done via participating in a live, weekend advisory board, where you received a total of $1,000 in honorarium for your time.

As part of the Sunshine Act, $1,000 gets reported as your level of involvement, right? Wrong. Add $1,000 in airfare expenses, $200 in meals, and $500 in hotel fees and a $1,000 interaction with a drug company is now being publicly recorded as receiving $2,700 per meeting— almost three times the actual compensation you received.

It is a flaw in the Sunshine Act that it considers non-direct compensation as something to report. It is perhaps easy to conclude that this is not in fact a flaw—it is an intended consequence of the Act—one intended to curtail interaction between MDs and manufacturers..

As a result of this, manufacturers are seeing increasing difficulty in recruiting thought-leading healthcare professionals to participate in various forms of collaboration, and this trend can only get worse as the Sunshine Act begins to take affect.