Prescribers found to be influenced by gifts

A team recently published a study that found a correlation between gifts from the pharmaceutical industry and prescribing patterns. Prescribers who received gifts tended to prescribe more medications per patients, more expensive medications, and a higher proportion of branded medications. Larger gifts were reported to have a larger impact.

While many outside of the medical community may view such findings as intuitive, many within the medical community oppose efforts to force disclosure of such gifts from industry. Given the information asymmetry between providers and their patients, it is helpful for patients to have tools to understand potential biases that their providers (or prospective providers) might have -- especially as patients increasingly directly shoulder the cost of their medical care.