Pharmaceutical companies spend more than a billion dollars annually to market their treatments, and a significant portion is targeted at doctors. These interactions between doctors and pharmaceutical companies include sponsored meals, promotional speaking, consulting and travel expenses.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) publicly release data on industry payments to doctors under the Open Payments program. ProPublica linked the Open Payments data with prescribing data from Medicare’s prescription drug program, known as Part D.

Our analysis found that for almost all of the 50 most-prescribed brand-name drugs in Medicare’s prescription drug program in 2016, physicians who had an interaction with the manufacturer involving that drug prescribed the drug at higher rates than physicians who did not. We also found that among providers who had such interactions, the dollar value of those interactions was larger for physicians who prescribed the drug than for those who did not. (As an additional sensitivity check, we conducted the same analysis looking at the 50 most-costly brand-name drugs in Medicare’s prescription drug program.)

With the available observational data we are not able to say whether payments lead to prescribing that is counter to patients’ interests, but our analysis provides new insight into the dynamics between doctors’ industry interactions and their prescribing.

Read our methodology for more about the analysis.

The data is available on the ProPublica data store.

• Analysis-ready data is available here.
• The Open Payments data used in the analysis was released by CMS on Jan. 17, 2018. That data is no longer available from CMS but can be accessed here. The latest version can be downloaded directly from CMS here.
• The Part D prescribing data used in the analysis can be downloaded here.