Main Goal of Sun Shine Act

The purpose of the Physician Payments Sunshine Act is to make information available and understandable to consumers and the public.

The goal of the Physician Payments Sunshine Act is to protect consumer by ensuring transparency in industry‐physician relationships. Swift implementation is crucial to begin to work toward achieving the goal of complete transparency. Effective transparency is possible only if the rules clearly define what information must be reported, when the reports are due, and how the reported data will be published in the public website, as required by the statute.

In the interest of collecting and publishing complete and accurate data, we believe that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) should

• Define the nature of payment categories and remove the proposed "other" category, which could be used to serve as a "catch all" and thereby obfuscate the true nature of payments;
• Provide clarification on the rules regarding indirect research payments,
• Provide more information regarding how the reported data will be presented and accessed from the public Website.

Sunshine Act enables companies to improve their sales and marketing. By correlating marketing expenditures to sales results, pharmaceutical and medical device companies can measure the effectiveness of their promotional investments with accuracy. Apart from this, pharmaceutical and health care companies can measure the return on their investments and effectively allocate the marketing budgets.

Sunshine Act Impact Synopsis

• Accounting/compliance systems must be developed and integrated
• Increased scrutiny of promotional programming both internally and externally
• Decreased reliance on a few top Opinion Leaders
• Optimizing promotional programming of heightened importance
• Increased need for evaluation and selection tools