Portfolio.com
By Brett Chases
July 9, 2010

Speaking and consulting gigs for drug companies can be lucrative for doctors.

Birmingham, Alabama, psychiatrist James E. Parker was paid more than $21,000 in speaking fees between January and March by a Johnson & Johnson company that sells mental health drugs.

Patricia Quinn, a retired Washington, D.C., physician and expert on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, received more than $26,00 in the same period for consulting and speaking fees paid by a J&J company that markets Concerta, a leading drug for the condition.

The payments are part of just-released disclosures by J&J, which is following Pfizer Inc. and GlaxoSmithKline Plc in making public the amounts of money it pays physicians for speaking, consulting and conducting clinical trials.

Unlike other drug companies, J&J didn’t aggregate the total payments but the Wall Street Journal tallied the sum to be around $2.85 million in payments in the first quarter. J&J has a large medical device division and it pledges to divulge doctor payments for that business by next year. In three years, drug and device companies will be required to report such payments to the government as part of the new health reform law.

The financial relationships between doctors and health products companies are being scrutinized more closely by critics, Congress and the Justice Department. Pfizer’s decision to reveal its payments wasn’t voluntary. It agreed to do so as part of a $2.3 billion fraud settlement with the government. The company was accused to pushing docs to prescribe medicines for unapproved uses.

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