Payments to key opinion leader physicians and drug sales of top pharmaceutical companies during the COVID-19 pandemic

  1. José Luis Sandoval
  2. Alex Friedlaender
  3. Alfredo Addeo
  4. Glen J. Weiss

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Abstract

Background

The unprecedented context of the COVID-19 pandemic poses the opportunity to study several questions in circumstances that would probably not otherwise occur. We sought to determine the dynamics of pharmaceutical company drug sales revenue, market capitalization and payments to physicians during the pandemic, focusing on payments to so-called key opinion leaders (KOLs).

Methods

We analyzed the CMS Open Payments data of 15 top pharmaceutical company general payments to US physicians. We calculated total payments per year for all physicians, KOLs and 2018 KOLs in subsequent years. Drug-related fold changes in payments, drug revenues and company market capitation were calculated using Q1-2018 as reference. Yearly differences in payments, drug sales revenue and market capitalization were tested using generalized estimation equations (GEE). A double-sided p<0.05 was considered significant.

Results

The analyzed dataset comprised 8,563,872 payments to 382,779 physicians. In 2020, we observed a reduction in payments to physicians and KOLs compared to prior years. The total amount per KOL physician per company also decreased for each year for KOLs and the 2018 KOLs in the subsequent years. Payments per drug, but neither drug revenues nor pharmaceutical company market capitalization, followed a downward trend in 2020 compared to prior years. GEE analysis confirmed that, compared to 2018, the decrease in payments to KOLs overall and for the top drugs of each company was statistically significant. Yet, no significant differences in drug sales revenue and market capitalization was observed.

Conclusions

A substantial and significant reduction in payments to KOLs during the first fiscal year of the COVID-19 pandemic was not associated with a reduction in drug sales revenue of blockbuster drug products and the market capitalization of 15 top pharmaceutical companies. Overall, these findings suggest that a substantial part of pharmaceutical payments to KOLs do not appear to impact top drug sales revenues.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2022.01.08.22268942: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Ethicsnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2022.01.08.22268942v1 on medRxiv