The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has given pharmaceutical companies two years to improve transparency on how much they pay doctors to attend overseas medical conferences, in a bid to deal with conflict of interest concerns.
Previously, pharmaceutical companies only had to reveal how much they spent providing hospitality for doctors at over 35,000 education events each year, which is reported as being nearly A$70m, according to News.com.au.
However, companies have never been forced to reveal how much they pay individual doctors.
These new calls for transparency come after concerns have been growing about payments such as these being a conflict of interest in the medical profession.
ACCC Commissioner Sarah Court said; "Improving transparency around payments to individual doctors will play an important role in promoting community confidence in the integrity of these payments to healthcare professionals."
Pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca earlier this year stopped paying for doctors to attend overseas conferences in an attempt to combat conflict-of-interest concerns and three other pharma companies, Pfizer, Eli Lilly and GlaxoSmithKline, are said to support the change.
At the beginning of 2012 GSK revealed it has spent $2.2m on doctors, with more than $287,000 being spent on travel to overseas and local medical conference.
The ACCC’s new requests come after a number of pharmaceutical companies in the United States started publishing details of individual payments made to healthcare professionals.
The ACCC said they are giving a two year window for more transparency in order to ensure "a framework for individual disclosure can be substantially addressed" and "an amended Code implemented by early 2015".
