Drug companies will have to report all payments to US doctors from March 2014

The Obama administration has released final rules on the reporting of financial relations between drug companies, device manufacturers, and healthcare providers.1

The rules are part of the so called “sunshine” provisions of the Affordable Care Act that were designed to create greater transparency in the healthcare marketplace.

They were supposed to have been finalized no later than 1 October 2011,2 3 but they became bogged down under review by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. They emerged only after a concerted public lobbying effort by medical and ethics figures such as the former editors of the New England Journal of Medicine Marcia Angell and Jerome Kassirer.

The regulations require pharmaceutical and device companies to report to …