SP to Grassley: Here's Your Disclosure, Right Here

Moving through this morning's pharma blogosphere is an AP story describing the responses of some drug or medical-device companies to Senator Chuck Grassley's request that they disclose their CME funding to outside groups. The current industry model is that of Eli Lilly, which provides a highly itemized (and therefore, very difficult-to-synthesize) online grants registry report for each financial quarter of 2007.

Among the companies' soup-to-nuts replies to Grassley:

• Medtronic will post payments for professional meetings and patient groups on May 1 (no mention of funds to medical communications companies);
• AstraZeneca will do the same on August 1;
• Merck is "currently in the process of developing an action plan";
• Amgen and Abbott have formed "working groups"; and
• nose-thumbing Schering-Plough reports that it has no plans "at the moment" to publish the requested information.

Today's WSJ Health Blog notes that Grassley's also sponsoring the Physician Payments Sunshine* Act of 2007, which will require quarterly reports from drug or medical-device companies to the DHHS regarding payments made to individual physicians or their employers.

CME = continuing medical education.

*As in, blow sunshine up my...?