• Elle Pope and Neil Sehgal.
• University of Maryland School of Public Health, 4200 Valley Drive, 3310C, College Park, MD, 20742-2611, USA. epope@umd.edu.
• J Gen Intern Med. 2023 Jun 1; 38 (8): 181218201812-1820.

BackgroundOpioid-related promotional payments are associated with increased prescribing of the promoted drug, but little is known about whether physicians receiving payments influence peers to accept similar payments.ObjectiveWe examine the association of physician network-level position among peers and the acceptance of opioid-related promotional payments using national publicly available datasets from 2015. Design National cross-sectional data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) National Downloadable File and Open Payment data.SubjectsPhysicians who shared Medicare patients with at least two other physicians in 2015.Main MeasuresModified Poisson's regressions are used to estimate the adjusted incidence rate ratio (aIRR) for social network position (i.e., degree, betweenness, and transitivity) and number of peers with payments as a function of individual receipt of opioid-related promotional payment and among those with payments, those who have five or more payments, and those who have $100 or more in payments.Key ResultsPhysicians with opioid-related payments were significantly more likely to have at least one peer with an opioid-related payment (IRR: 2.5, 95% CI: 2.3-2.8), but had fewer shared patients (i.e., top quartile compared to the first quartile for degree centrality: 0.4, 95% CI: 0.3-0.4) and belonged to less cohesive networks (i.e., top quartile compared to the first quartile for betweenness centrality: 0.9, 95% CI: 0.8-0.9).ConclusionsOur study demonstrates that physicians receiving opioid-related payments are more likely to cluster within physician networks.© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Society of General Internal Medicine.

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