Offering physicians free or cheap meals in exchange for promoting opioid products may be increasing their prescribing patterns, according to a Boston Medical Center study reported by The Boston Herald.
A team of researchers — led by Scott Hadland, MD, an addiction researcher at BMC's Grayken Center for Addiction — reviewed marketing exchanges on the Open Payments Database. They gathered information on all opioid-related payments to physicians, such as speaking fees, consulting fees and meals, and compared those statistics against Medicare Part D claims.
The researchers found 369,139 physicians prescribed opioids under Medicare Part D in 2015, and 7 percent of them received a total of $9.07 million in opioid-related pharmaceutical payments. Only 1.7 percent of physicians who received marketing exchanges took payments of more than $1,000.
Ninety-two percent of opioid payments were in the form of meals, with a median cost of $13, and prescribing patterns increased with each meal.
"We may think of free meals as fairly innocuous, but in fact they do seem to have an impact," said Brandon Marshall, PhD, co-author and associate professor of epidemiology at Providence, R.I.-based Brown University School of Public Health, according to The Boston Herald. "In terms of regulatory actions, we may want improved regulations over the number of interactions, not just the value … even right down to free lunch events."
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