Two years into the Sunshine Act: synopsis of opportunities, challenges, learnings, and potential implications.

Responsible transparency helps to promote integrity between industry and researchers and has the potential to increase public trust. As part of its inevitable evolution, the Open Payments database is likely to have opportunities to increase and improve the context around the data that it reports, thus leading to a decrease in the currently encountered confusion and misinterpretation of the data. A major challenge faced by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is to make the data more informative and educational, to allow the Sunshine Act to meet its transparency goals while improving healthcare innovation.

The sunshine act and medical publications: Guidance from professional medical associations.

OBJECTIVE: To review guidance from professional medical associations to physicians on the Sunshine Act, with a focus on industry support for medical publications. METHODS: Using 'Sunshine Act' as a search term, we searched PubMed (dates February 2013 to November 2014) and the 'grey literature' using Google and Google Scholar. Online information was extracted from websites of pre-identified professional medical associations. RESULTS: Some professional medical associations have published peer-reviewed recommendations, position statements or general advice on their websites and in journals around the Sunshine Act. Associations also provided broad online educational resources for physicians. There was universal agreement between peer-reviewed publications, including guidelines, for the need for full transparency and disclosure of industry support. Surveys by some professional associations showed variance in opinion on the forecasted impact of the Sunshine Act on physician-industry relationships. There was scarce information specifically related to reporting requirements for industry-supported medical publications. CONCLUSIONS: There is a shortage of information for physicians from professional associations regarding the Sunshine Act and support for medical publications. Due to the lack of clear guidance regarding support for publications, there are presently varying interpretations of the Sunshine Act. The literature debates the potential impact of the Sunshine Act and expresses some concerns that physician-enabled innovation in drug development may be hindered.