Summary of non-research payments to board-certified allergists
Between 2016 and 2020, 2,398 of the 3,943 board-certified allergists (60.8%) received at least one non-research payment for lecturing, consulting, and drafting from pharmaceutical companies, as detailed in Table 1. The total number of payments amounted to 30,849, with an aggregate value of $43,385,284, distributed by 84 different pharmaceutical entities over the five years. Lecturing payments constituted the majority of this sum, exceeding $37.2 million (85.7% of the total payment amounts), followed by consulting at $4.3 million (9.9%) and drafting at $1.9 million (4.3%). There was large gap between mean and median payment amounts. For allergists who received at least one payment, the median amount per allergist was $3,106 (interquartile range [IQR]: $966 – $12,124), in contrast to a mean of $18,092 (standard deviation [SD]: $49,233) over the five-year span. The Gini index, used to measure payment distribution among allergists, was 0.874, suggesting that a small proportion of allergists received the majority of non-research payments over the five years. Specifically, the top 1%, 5%, and 10% of these allergists accounted for 20.8%, 52.8%, and 68.8% of all non-research payments, respectively (Figure 1).