Articles and Speeches
Vendor – Healthcare Professional Gift Giving, Marketing, and Compliance
September 21, 2010
Jana Kolarik Anderson
The author participated in the writing of this article before joining Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP
Copyright 2007 American Health Lawyers Association, Washington, D.C. Reprint permission granted. Further reprint requests should be directed to American Health Lawyers Association, 1025 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036, (202) 833-1100
A debate has heated up within the healthcare industry involving potential conflicts of interest between healthcare professionals and vendors resulting from gift-giving and other marketing practices. The issue has been grabbing headlines in prominent publications such as Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, USA Today, the N.Y. Times, and the Washington Post and is described in a recent article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) as “a conflict of interest between physicians’ commitment to patient care and the desire of pharmaceutical companies and their representatives to sell their products.” While most of the literature and authority on this subject has focused on physicians and the pharmaceutical industry, the issues raised are equally relevant to all medical device and equipment manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors, and other medical service providers (collectively, the “vendors”) and the subjects of their marketing, which include individual practitioners, healthcare entities, providers, and suppliers (collectively, the “healthcare professionals”).
