As transparency of conflicts of interest becomes more and more important internationally, there is concern in the medical field that opaque gratitude and donations from pharmaceutical companies to doctors may have an impact on drug guidelines, prescriptions, and medical devices, giving preference to the pharmaceutical company that they received money from. In addition, in 2021, arrests were made at Ono Pharmaceutical and Mie University School of Medicine over the inducement of prescribing by scholarship donations. Receiving pharmaceutical money has been widely legislated in the U.S., France, and other countries, and public databases have been established. In Japan, however, discussions on whether to create a public database have just begun.

Currently, pharmaceutical companies disclose their payments to doctors and medical institutions in accordance with the Transparency Guidelines for the Relationship between Corporate Activities and Medical Institutions issued by the JPMA, but this is not in the public interest because the data by each pharmaceutical company is not integrated into a single database and the accessibility is extremely low.

Therefore, the Medical Governance Research Institute has compiled and integrated data and has made it publicly available since 2019 on the Internet as "Yens for Docs Database".

The goal is to raise awareness of the financial relationship between pharmaceutical companies and healthcare providers, and to improve patient care. The number of database users has exceeded 260,000 even since 2021, and this database is also used by the National Diet and government agencies. Educational and international academic activities concerning young medical professionals are being conducted using this database, and more than 40 papers have been published in English journals.

As in the United States and other Western countries, the database has become a necessary part of the public social infrastructure in Japan. However, the cost of creating the database, including personnel expenses, exceeds 2 million yen each year, which has been covered by donations from our NPO. We are strengthening our financial base to continue creating the database in the long term.

We would like to ask for your warm support for the database creation project in 2020 and beyond.

NPO Medical Governance Research Institute
Director : Masahiro Kami

Achieving transparency in conflict of interest (Pharmaceutical money) project
Project leader : Akihiko Ozaki