Trust through transparency

Trust is a precious thing, and building trust takes hard work. At Boehringer Ingelheim, we believe in openness in providing information about our activities. In this process, we focus on transparency, and seek to increase it by supporting industry self-regulations where there are no national laws. One example of such self-regulation is the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) Code of Practice.

Under the EFPIA Code of Practice, all EFPIA members and participants in EFPIA member associations voluntarily undertake to disclose all payments and transfers of value they make to healthcare professionals, healthcare organizations and patient organizations. The objective of the Code is to protect the integrity of partnerships between pharma companies and healthcare stakeholders, while bringing transparency and clarity to these partnerships. This strengthens the relationships of trust between the individual partners and with the public.

The Origins

To bring greater transparency to the collaboration between the pharmaceutical industry and multiple healthcare stakeholders, several countries have implemented various regulations on the public disclosure of transfers of values provided to healthcare professionals, healthcare organizations, patient organizations and other stakeholders from companies operating in the pharma and other life sciences industries.

In some cases, these regulations are national/federal or state/regional laws (e.g., the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – the “U.S. Sunshine Act”), in other countries, these rules are a form of self-regulation coming from Industry Codes of Practice (e.g., EFPIA or other National Pharma Industry Associations).

Our Commitment

At Boehringer Ingelheim, we are convinced that this open documentation of our transfers of value will bring clarity to our partnerships with healthcare players. The partners with which we collaborate, and the context of those collaborations can be openly traced. By undertaking this course, we anticipate socio-political demands for enhanced transparency and demonstrating the ethically sound framework of our partnerships. For this reason, transparency in clinical trials and cooperation with patient organizations are as well a matter of course for us.