Trust Through Transparency
Trust is a precious thing, and building trust takes hard work—especially in the healthcare sector. At Boehringer Ingelheim, we believe in openness in providing information about our activities. In this process we focus on transparency, and seek to increase it by supporting the Disclosure Code of European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA).
Under the EFPIA Disclosure Code, all EFPIA members and participants in EFPIA member associations voluntarily undertake to disclose all payments and transfers of value they make to medical professionals and healthcare organizations. The objective of the Code is to protect the integrity of partnerships between individual healthcare professionals, while bringing transparency and clarity to making these partnerships. This strengthens the relationships of trust between the individual partners and with the public.
The Origins
The EFPIA Disclosure Code is based on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Sunshine Act), a US law which regulates transparency in relationships between pharmaceutical manufacturers, manufacturers of medical devices and aids, and medical professionals and teaching hospitals. The Code requires all manufacturers of pharmaceuticals and medical products to document any payments and transfers of value greater than $10 which they make to medical professionals and teaching hospitals, and to disclose them to the Center of Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
Our Commitment
At Boehringer Ingelheim we are convinced that this open documentation of our payments will bring clarity to our partnerships with healthcare players. In future, the partners with which we collaborate and the context of those collaborations can be openly traced. By undertaking this course, we are responding to socio-political demand for enhanced transparency and demonstrating the ethically sound framework of our partnerships. For this reason, transparency in clinical trials and cooperation with patient organizations are a matter of course for us.
References
https://www.efpia.eu/media/25046/efpia_about_disclosure_code_march-2016.pdf, last accessed on April 19, 2016