INTRODUCTION: The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Open Payments database is a public database resulting from the Physician
Payments Sunshine Act of 2010. It was designed to increase transparency of physicians’ financial relationships with pharmaceutical manufacturers.
Comparison between physician reported conflict-of-interest disclosures in journal articles with this database allows us to determine discrepancies in
physician reported disclosures. Using this database, our objective was to determine the conflict-of-interest disclosure accuracy rates for papers published to orthopaedic journals.
METHODS: We analyzed conflicts-of-interest (COI) reported by authors of each paper published in three journals: Foot and Ankle International (FAI), The
Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery(JBJS), and The Journal of Arthroplasty(JOA), for the years 2014 through 2016. Payment information in CMS Open
Payments database was then cross-referenced with each author’s disclosure statement to determine if a disclosure discrepancy was present.
RESULTS: A total of 3,465 authors publishing 1,770 articles were reviewed in this study. Within this sample, 7.1% of authors had a recorded undisclosed
COI and 13.2% of articles had either a first and/or last author with a disclosure discrepancy. Additionally, great variation in the percentage of authors with
disclosure discrepancies was seen between journals, with JBJS at 2.3%, JOA at 3.6%, and FAI at 23.7%.
DISCUSSION: There are numerous possible reasons to explain the discrepancy in disclosures. These may include, but are not limited to, an author’s failure
to recognize the importance of disclosing any payments received, forgetting what payments had been received, and ambiguous disclosure instructions
provided by a journal. Although steps are being taken to ensure honesty and accuracy in authors’ disclosing COI’s, given the percentages shown, more effort
is needed.
SIGNIFICANCE/CLINICAL RELEVANCE: Few studies have aimed to determine COI disclosure accuracy, and even fewer have compared disclosure data
between journals and years. This study aims to divulge the differences in disclosure accuracy between journals and years as well as elaborate on some of the
possible reasons underlying the differences seen.

1210 - Disclosures Undisclosed