Dollars for Docs
The following link includes payments from 2013 to 2015
Dollars for Docs
The following link includes payments made through 2016:
Open Payments Data
Other Links:
About the Dollars for Docs Data
“ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs database contains payments to doctors and teaching hospitals from pharmaceutical and medical device companies made between August 2013 and December 2015. The disclosures were required under the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, a part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act.
The database includes “general payments” — 15 categories including promotional speaking, consulting, meals, travel and royalties. It does not include research payments nor does it include physicians’ ownership stakes in companies. Research payments will be included in Dollars for Docs in the future. Detailed descriptions of the payments can be found here.
The doctors included in our tool include medical doctors (MD), dentists, osteopaths (DO), optometrists, podiatrists and chiropractors. The tool does not include nurse practitioners and physician assistants (because companies are not required to report payments to them.) The tool also allows you to search teaching hospitals.
We’ve taken the payment reports, which were released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and compiled them into a single, comprehensive database that allows patients to search for their physician and receive a listing of all payments matching that name. We provide rankings for each doctor to allow comparisons to peers in the same specialty and state.
Our analysis found that most doctors take payments, and that doctors who receive payments are, on average, more likely to prescribe a higher percentage of brand-name drugs. For each physician in Dollars for Docs, we document the number of payments he or she received, the total of those payments, and the number of different companies that paid him or her.
The bulk of each physician’s page is taken up by information on each payment he or she received, the company making the payment, the date of the payment, the names of the drugs and medical devices associated with the payment, and whether the payment was made to a third party entity. Sometimes, payments are not made directly to doctors but instead are provided to their universities, medical practices or research centers. We also note whether a doctor has disputed the payment.
By default, a physician’s page shows aggregate amounts received by year and details of payments in the most recent year reported. Users can display other years by using the dropdown at the top of each doctor page. Company and product pages display aggregate totals across all payment years (2013 to 2015).
Sometimes, more than one company makes payments related to a single drug or device. On each product page, we note the number of companies making payments, as well as the names of those companies. Each payment can also be attributed to more than one product, so we note the percentage of payments that relate only to that product (meaning no other products were mentioned in the payment).
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ProPublica has published Dollars for Docs since 2010, at first using payment reports that certain companies were required to publish as part of legal settlements with the federal government. Often, these settlements were related to whistleblower lawsuits alleging improper marketing or kickbacks by the company. The now-archived version of our database includes $4 billion in payments from 17 companies, from 2009 to 2013. An archive of those payments is still available at projects.propublica.org/d4d-archive.
We have made some effort to normalize the data and eliminate duplicates, but data is primarily as it has been reported by the companies to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
About Open Payments
“Open Payments is a national transparency program that collects and publishes information about financial relationships between the health care industry (i.e. drug and device companies) and providers (i.e. physicians and teaching hospitals). These relationships may involve payments to providers for things such as research, meals, travel, gifts, or speaking fees. One of the ways that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) provides data to the public is through this search tool, which allows the public to search for physicians and teaching hospitals receiving payments, as well as companies that have made payments.
The purpose of the program is to provide the public with a more transparent healthcare system. All information available on the Open Payments database is open to personal interpretation and if there are questions about the data, healthcare consumers should speak directly to the healthcare provider for a better understanding. More information about the program can be found on the CMS Open Payments website.
There you can get an overview of the data that is collected and displayed and learn more about what is included in the data. For other Open Payments related questions, contact the Open Payments team at openpayments@cms.hhs.gov.
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