Comparison of Conflicts of Interest among Published Hernia Researchers Self-Reported with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Open Payments Database

Abstract

Many healthcare providers have financial interests and relationships with healthcare companies. To maintain transparency, investigators are expected to disclose their conflicts of interest (COIs). Recently, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services developed the Open Payment database of COIs reported by industry. We hypothesize that there is discordance between industry-reported and physician self-reported COIs in ventral hernia publications. PubMed was searched for ventral hernia studies accepted for publication between June 2013 and October 2015 and published by authors from the US. Conflicts of interest were defined as payments received as honoraria, consulting fees, compensation for serving as faculty or as a speaker at a venue, research funding payments, or having ownerships/partnerships in companies. Conflicts of interest disclosed on the published articles were compared with the financial relationships in the Open Payments database. A total of 100 studies were selected with 497 participating authors. Information was available from the Open Payments database for 245 (49.2%) authors, of which 134 (26.9%) met the definition for COI. When comparing COIs disclosed by authors and data in the Open Payments database, 81 (16.3%) authors had at least 1 COI but did not declare any, 35 (7.0%) authors had COIs other than what they declared, and 20 (4.0%) declared a COI not listed in the Open Payments database, for a combined discordance rate of 27.3%. There is substantial discordance between self-reported COI in published articles compared with those in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Open Payments database. Additional studies are needed to determine the reasons for these differences, as COI can influence the validity of the design, conduct, and results of a study.