Footnotes

• Twitter Follow William Fleischman at @WillFleischman

• Contributors WF conceptualised and drafted the manuscript. JSR helped conceptualise and edit the manuscript.

• Disclaimer The opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect the view of the Department of Health and Human Services, or of the USA government.

• Competing interests All authors have completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form at http://www.icmje.org/coi_disclosure.pdf and declare: WF serves as a volunteer researcher at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency that administers the Open Payments programme. This article was written by WF in his personal capacity. JSR receives support through Yale University from CMS to develop and maintain performance measures that are used for public reporting, from Medtronic and Johnson and Johnson to develop methods of clinical trial data sharing, from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) to better understand medical technology evidence generation, and from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to develop methods for postmarket surveillance of medical devices.

• Ethics approval The Yale University Institutional Review Board approved this study and provided oversight.

• Provenance and peer review Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

• Data sharing statement Requests for the raw data as well as the statistical code can be made to the corresponding author at wf3@buffalo.edu.