In August 2013, the Physician Payment Sunshine Act went into effect, meaning industry interactions with physicians were recorded and published online. The first set of interactions published on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services website were in September 2014, leading some physicians to think twice about how they relate to device companies.
“I think surgeons don’t want to deal with the fall out and don’t want their data out there,” says Frank M. Phillips, MD, Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at Rush University Medical Center and co-director of the Minimally Invasive Spine Institute at Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush in Chicago. “There are innovative spinal surgeons who are avoiding working with industry because of the negative connotations that have been created by legislators and the media. Surgeon inventors have been vilified for receiving royalty payments from implant manufacturers for products they have developed.”
There are few other funding sources beyond device companies for clinical trials. The federal government has limited grants for research and specialty organizations such as the Orthopaedic Research Education Foundation have some resources to doll out, but not enough to fund most of the projects in the field today.
