CMS Open Payments — Pharma Money to Doctors

Since the Sunshine Act, every payment from a drug or device manufacturer to a physician is disclosed. Pair with Medicare prescribing data and you can see the correlation between payments received and drugs prescribed.

This project focuses on GLP-1 drugs (Ozempic, Mounjaro) and anticoagulants (Eliquis, Xarelto), running OLS regressions with specialty and state fixed effects to estimate the payment-prescribing relationship. It also maps the top 100 royalty recipients and tracks Novo Nordisk/Lilly payment patterns to endocrinologists 2020-2023.

Data sources: CMS Open Payments bulk CSV (free), Medicare Part D Prescriber Data (free). NPI is the join key.