2016 Azbee Awards of Excellence

Category

Online > Data Journalism > Northeast

Awarded to

John Fauber, Investigative Reporter; Kristina Fiore, Associate Editor; Parker Brown, Staff Writer; Coulter Jones, Data Reporter

Entry details

Slippery Slope: The Dark Money of Medicine

Issue date (if applicable): 10/18/2015
Publication name: MedPage Today
Publishing company: MedPage Today
Website home page: medpagetoday.com

Please describe the publication's mission and readership:

MedPageToday is a trusted and reliable online-only source for clinical and policy coverage that directly affects the lives and practices of healthcare professionals. Physicians and other healthcare professionals may also receive Continuing Medical Education (CME) credits at no cost for participating in MedPage Today hosted educational activities. Our primary audience is upper-level healthcare professionals including physicians (allopathic and osteopathic), nurse practitioners and physician assistants, although our content is open to anyone.

Please describe the enterprising work that went into this entry and its significance or impact on readers:

The infographic was a key component of an article package – the main one of which is also linked here – on pharmaceutical company sponsorship of continuing medical education (CME) programs. All physicians are required to participate in CME programs to maintain their licenses. Many different organizations create CME programs, some for-profit, some not-for-profit, but in both cases they may be supported by drug or device companies.

Those companies cannot control the program content directly, but that doesn’t mean they can’t influence it indirectly. Some of these programs appear to be thinly disguised advertisements for products made by the program sponsors, as the investigation by John Fauber, employed jointly by MedPage Today and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and MedPage Today’s Coulter Jones, Kristina Fiore, and Parker Brown revealed.

The infographic illustrates “the dark money of medicine”: the changing patterns of sources and recipients of funding in the multi-billion-dollar CME industry. The text article, meanwhile, examines how CME programs have been used to promote testosterone supplements for uses not approved by the FDA and that have little to know scientific basis. Our team drew on FDA adverse event reports, CME accreditation records, and pharmaceutical industry data to document these patterns.

Links to entry URLs

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Entry URL(s), if applicable:
http://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/slipperyslope/54143
http://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/slipperyslope/54156

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