Pharmaceutical Industry Payments to Medical Oncologists in the Netherlands: Trends and Patterns Provided by an Open-Access Transparency Data Set.

Purpose: Health care expenditure related to oncologic treatments is skyrocketing although many treatments offer marginal, if any, clinical benefit. Financial conflicts of interest (fCOI) resulting from pharmaceutical industry (pharma) payments to physicians is increasingly recognized as a predictive factor for regulatory board approval and guideline incorporation of low-value treatments. We sought to study the extent to which pharma payments to medical oncologists occur in the Netherlands, the amount of money involved, and whether these occur more frequently and are higher for key opinion leaders (KOLs).