Several of the nation's largest pharmaceutical companies said they plan to tighten screening of physicians who promote their drugs after ProPublica reported last month that more than 250 of them had been sanctioned for misconduct.
Eli Lilly and Co. said that next year, for the first time, it would hire an outside firm to search for state disciplinary actions against its hired speakers and advisers. Lilly, the seventh-largest company by U.S. prescription sales, did not previously conduct such screening and was unaware of the dozens of actions ProPublica found against its speaker.
"Your reporting has raised valid and important questions, which we have taken steps to address," spokesman J. Scott MacGregor said in a statement.
AstraZeneca, the third-largest firm, is "evaluating new ways to retrieve state disciplinary actions that would allow us to act on that information in a timely manner," spokesman Tony Jewell said in an interview.
Pfizer, the largest U.S. company, said in a statement that it is doing the same.
Last month, ProPublica published an online database, Dollars for Docs [1], that includes payments from seven pharmaceutical companies to health providers in 2009 and 2010. A review then of medical board sites in 18 states turned up more than 250 doctors who had been subject to various regulatory sanctions.
Based on checks with medical boards in the 30 most populous states and warning letters issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, we have found dozens more. Today, we are publishing a list of 292 physicians [2] who have had government actions taken against them, as well as the companies that paid them.
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