In the United States, the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, passed by Congress as part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, has brought greater transparency to financial relationships between industry and physicians. The Sunshine Act requires manufacturers of medical devices and pharmaceuticals to use the Open Payments Program (OPP) to report payments to “covered recipients,” which includes teaching hospitals and medical professionals not employed by a manufacturer, and “non-covered entities” (NCEs), which includes physician principal investigators (PIs) [1].
