What We’ve Learned From Four Years of Diving Into Dollars for Docs - ProPublica
Many, many health professionals have relationships with industry.
Payments to Doctors Are WidespreadBelow are the approximate numbers of health professionals who received some payment from each company in 2013, excluding research. We based this on the number of unique names, cities and states per company.
Dollars for Docs now includes 3.4 million payments since 2009, totaling more than $4 billion, of which $2.5 billion was for research. For 2013 alone, there were 1.2 million payments valued at nearly $1.4 billion.It’s not possible to calculate the exact number of physicians represented, because drug companies haven’t used unique identification numbers that cross company lines. But it’s clear that the figure is in the hundreds of thousands.
Excluding research payments, the drugmaker Pfizer appeared to have interactions with the most health care professionals last year — about 142,600. AstraZeneca came in second with about 111,200. Johnson & Johnson and Forest Labs each had nearly 100,000. There are an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 active doctors in the United States.
“Most physicians that are in private practice are touched in some way” by the industry, said George Dunston, co-founder of Obsidian HDS, the creator of Pharmashine. “You add that up and it’s a pretty significant number.”
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