Marketing payments to cancer doctors lead to more prescriptions but not better outcomes, NBER paper finds

Can­cer drug­mak­ers’ mar­ket­ing pay­ments to physi­cians do work, but they don’t im­prove pa­tient mor­tal­i­ty, ac­cord­ing to a new Na­tion­al Bu­reau of Eco­nom­ic Re­search work­ing pa­per.

Re­searchers tracked an in­crease in Medicare pre­scrip­tions in the 12 months af­ter physi­cians re­ceived mar­ket­ing pay­ments, but al­so found “no changes” in sur­vival among those same physi­cians’ pa­tients.

The re­searchers from Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty and Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton used pay­ment da­ta from the Open Pay­ments data­base, which in­clude meals, speak­er fees and con­sult­ing fees from phar­ma com­pa­nies to physi­cians. 67% of the physi­cians in the sam­ple re­ceived at least one can­cer drug mar­ket­ing pay­ment dur­ing the 2014-2018 study pe­ri­od. The re­search is cur­rent­ly in re­view at NBER.

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