Angela Lu is training to be a physician. She’s interested in public policy. As a third year medical student, she teamed up with established leaders to ask a unique question regarding public disclosure of financial relationships.

When the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issues National Coverage Determinations (NCDs) for services or products, they mean business. Such decisions have huge implications. You cannot go against them. Think #HighConsequences.

CMS studies the evidence and publishes a proposed decision. It then allows public comments. People care.

The idea behind their study, which made it into the Journal of the American Medical Association, was to study how many commenters disclosed their financial conflicts.

Dr. Lu went through more than 680 comments submitted on 4 NCDs—all of which were high cost invasive procedures.

I won’t spoil the conversation, but they found a very high percentages of comments asking to expand indications for these procedures and very very low percentages of people who disclosed their relevant relationships. This study was made possible by the Open Payments database.

One important note: disclosure of relationships was voluntary. Enjoy the conversation. Thanks for listening. JMM

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