Nearly 100 national and state medical groups, including the American Medical Association and the American College of Cardiology, are backing a Senate bill that would lift requirements imposed upon drug and device makers to disclose payments made to physicians for attending continuing medical education sessions or receiving medical journals or textbooks, according to STAT.
The Senate bill, called the Protect Continuing Physician Education and Patient Care Act, was introduced by a Wyoming Republican and a physician.
"Passage of this bill is urgently needed to remedy onerous and burdensome reporting obligations imposed by CMS that have already chilled the dissemination of medical textbooks and peer-reviewed medical reprints and journals, and to avert a similar negative impact on access to independent" CME, the authors of the bill wrote to Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) in a June 30 letter.
This latest move is part of an effort to scale back requirements on reporting industry payments to OpenPayments, a federal database that tracks financial relationships between companies and physicians. The database was launched in 2014 under the Sunshine Act provision of the Affordable Care Act in response to concerns that industry payments could unfairly influence medical practice and research, according to the report.
CME has been a particularly controversial topic, with concerns that drug and device companies that fund CME courses have too great of influence over the curriculum. In 2015, industry financial support for CME totaled $693 million, up 2 percent from 2014, according to the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education.
In late 2014, CMS decided reporting CME payments would be required under the Sunshine Act, as medical information has value that physicians would otherwise have to pay for. As a result, industry and medical societies have lobbied to eliminate the reporting requirement, according to the report.