Payment data reported by pharmaceutical companies
To improve transparency in financial relationships between pharmaceutical companies and healthcare professionals, the Japanese Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (JPMA), representing of more than 70 leading pharmaceutical companies, demands its member companies to disclose payments for lecturing, consulting, and manuscript drafting made to physicians, including the recipients’ names and affiliations on their websites, as previously explained[22,23]. However, according to the JPMA guidance, payment categories, such as meals, travel and accommodations, and other gifts, are disclosed in aggregated amounts and could not be analyzed at individual physician level[23,51]. Thus, we focused on lecturing, consulting, and drafting payments to neurologists in this study.
We retrieved the names and affiliated hospitals of all board-certified neurologists from the JSN website. Then, we collected the personal payments made for lecturing, consulting, and drafting services to these neurologists by JPMA-affiliated companies from a publicly accessible payment database from 2016 to 2020[52], as conducted in prior studies[15-17,20].