The University of Miami medical school has become one of the first in the country to offer an online, searchable database revealing its doctors' relationships with outside businesses.
"This is a growing trend,'' says Alan Coukell, director of the nonprofit Pew Prescription Project. "I know of four other schools [two of them are linked at the bottom of this page] that are doing this. With the passage of the Sunshine Act, there's going to be a lot, lot more.''
A provision of the new healthcare reform law, the Physician Payments Sunshine section, requires all manufacturers of prescription drugs, medical devices, and supplies must reveal any payment of more than $10 to physicians and teaching hospitals.
Such requirements were pushed by lawmakers after Pew and others exposed relationships between doctors' prescribing patterns and their oft-hidden relationships with the drug makers.
The sunshine provision starts in 2012, with the federal government required to have a searchable database by Sept. 30, 2013.
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The UM website -- med.miami.edu/about/opa.asp -- is searchable by name of faculty member or by name of company. It will be updated at least annually and now includes data for fiscal 2009 -- which ended May 31, 2009. It lists doctors' relationship with outside companies -- but not the dollar amounts of the deals, which will start to be added later this year.
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