ProPublica has compiled ready-to-use data on billions of dollars paid by pharmaceutical companies to medical providers and health care institutions between August 2013 and December 2018. Dollars for Docs, ProPublica's free, online lookup tool, now covers nearly $12 billion in medical industry payments made to more than 1 million physicians in the United States. This premium dataset is a downloadable version of the database that powers our tool.
As of November 2019, the data is provided in two separate tranches: January 2017-December 2018 and August 2013-December 2016. (You can purchase or download a sample of the 2013-2016 data here.) This page includes information about the 2017-2018 data.
This data set is based on the June 2019 release of the federal Open Payments database, and has been cleaned, analyzed, and matched with additional information. The data can be combined with our exclusive NPI-Open Payments ID crosswalk (available here), which enables users to match this information to other provider-level data.
The data will be provided as six separate CSV files, with documentation, and your purchase includes:
- Documentation outlining our methodology, data sources, caveats for using the data, and a data dictionary for each of the included tables.
- A ready-to-use version of the federal Open Payments general payments data, for which we have cleaned company names, drug names, and device names. We have standardized how each company, drug, and device is listed, and eliminated duplicates (meaning if a product was listed as both a drug and device, we figured out which was correct).
- A summary for each provider in the database, including their specialty, contact information, and aggregated payment information (number of payments received, total monetary value of payments received, and number of companies from which payments were received).
- A companion table to the payments file, that identifies each drug or device associated with a payment on its own line. Open Payments records sometimes include multiple drugs and/or devices associated with each payment. This is a many-to-many table of payment-product pairs, which allows users to identify the number of payments attributed to a drug or device or identify which providers received payments associated with particular products.
- Additional tables with basic information on products, companies, and teaching hospital payment recipients that can be joined with the other tables for more detailed analyses.
- Not included: The NPI-Open Payments crosswalk, which matches providers Open Payment IDs to their National Provider Identifier (NPI) number. The crosswalk is available for purchase here.
Please note: CMS updates the data every six months, with updates to the data, including corrections, additions, and removal of payments. Updates provided by CMS after January 2018 have not been included in this cleaned version of the data.
Custom data segments are also available, with selections based on information such as provider specialty, location, NPI number, or hospital affiliation, as well as drug, device, and/or manufacturer. Submit a request here, being sure to include any information about your specific needs.
