In 2016, ProPublica linked the Open Payments data with prescribing data from Medicare’s prescription drug program, known as Part D, and found a relationship between the total dollar value of a doctor’s interactions with drug and device companies and the overall percentage of brand-name drugs he or she prescribed.
Full Answer
How many health providers prescribed $5 million in drugs in 2011?
Forty-one health providers prescribed more than $5 million in drugs in 2011. In 2014, that jumped to 514. Read More » What do you think about this data? Questions, corrections or concerns? Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; National Technical Information Service; First Databank
How do I update my information about my ProPublica subscription?
If you change your listing, send a note to checkup@propublica.org and we will update your information. If you have other questions about this data, send a note to checkup@propublica.org .
Where can I find Medicare Part D prescribing data?
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; National Technical Information Service; First Databank Prescribing data from Medicare’s prescription drug benefit, known as Part D, was compiled and released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that oversees the program.
Who are the authors of the new ProPublica report?
Originally reported and developed by Jeff Larson, Charles Ornstein, Jennifer LaFleur, Tracy Weber and Lena V. Groeger. ProPublica intern Hanna Trudo and freelancer Jesse Nankin contributed research for this project.
How many Medicare Part D prescriptions were dispensed in 2016?
Medicare Part D data is provided by CMS as a publicly available download 1. In 2016, Medicare Part D covered more than 41 million seniors and disabled people. A total of about 1.5 billion prescriptions were dispensed for about 3,000 drugs. More than a million providers prescribed under the program.
Why do doctors write additional prescriptions?
Financial interactions with pharma ceutical companies may cause doctors to write additional prescriptions that are not medically necessary, to substitute their prescribing toward less suitable drugs or to prescribe more expensive drugs over cheaper and equally appropriate options.
What drugs were removed from the 2016 payment?
However, for several drugs, data for payments made in 2016 changed appreciably in subsequent releases: For three drugs, Copaxone, ProAir and QVAR, nearly all payments in 2016 were removed in a subsequent data release. Payments for those three drugs appear for prior years and for 2017 and 2018.
How much money do pharmaceutical companies spend on treatments?
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.
Does Medicare cover Medicare Part D?
For some physicians, only a small portion of their prescribing is under Part D. And prescribing under Part D skews toward an older patient population, though Medicare also covers disabled patients. Furthermore, the provider identified in the Part D prescribing data may not always be the medical decision-maker.
Can industry influence prescriptions?
We cannot speak directly to causality. Industry interactions may influence which prescriptions a doctor chooses to write, either against or in line with patients’ best interests. Or the causality could run in the other direction: a doctor’s prescribing practices trigger the interactions.
Does prostate cancer have a connection to cancer?
A study of prostate cancer treatment s did not find evidence of a connection. A 2018 report by CareDash found that doctors who had an interaction with the makers of particular brand-name drugs prescribed that company’s drug more than the generic alternative.
High-Dollar Prescribers Proliferate in Medicare Drug Program
Forty-one health providers prescribed more than $5 million in drugs in 2011. In 2014, that jumped to 514. Read More »
All Drugs
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; National Technical Information Service; First Databank
What did the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services find?
Department of Health and Human Services complement a recent ProPublica review that found many doctors bill for services very differently than their peers.
How much did Medicare pay for office visits in 2012?
Medicare paid for more than 200 million office visits for established patients in 2012. Overall, health professionals classified only 4 percent as complex enough to command the most expensive rates. But 1,800 providers billed at the top level at least 90 percent of the time, a ProPublica analysis found. Experts question whether the charges are ...
How much did Acthar cost for Medicare?
Experts question the effectiveness of H.P. Acthar Gel, a drug made from pigs’ pituitary glands. Yet it cost Medicare more than $141 million in 2012, up from $7 million in 2008.
Do you have to rely on a friend's recommendation?
When choosing a doctor who's right for you, you don't have to rely exclusively on a friend's recommendation or a referral. Now you can check whether your medical provider practices similarly to his or her peers.
Does Medicare keep paying after being arrested?
Even After Doctors Are Sanctioned or Arrested, Medicare Keeps Paying. A ProPublica analysis of recently released data shows that dozens of physicians who received payments from Medicare in 2012 had been kicked out of Medicaid, charged with fraud, or settled claims of overbilling Medicare itself. by Charles Ornstein.
What is Medicare Part D lookup?
A lookup file for drugs to determine if they fall into specific categories, including antibiotics, Beers list drugs, and more. A summary file of all drugs dispensed in Medicare Part D in the covered calendar year, based on the number of fills, including the respective fill rank and cost rank in each state.
What is a main provider file?
A main provider file that includes overall information for each provider, including name, location and summary prescription tallies. This includes all providers who wrote at least 50 prescriptions (in Medicare Part D) for at least one drug in the covered calendar year. About 447,000 providers met that criteria.
What is Medicare Part B?
This dataset provides details on payments made through Medicare Part B to individual doctors and other health professionals for services as varied as office visits, ambulance mileage, lab tests, and the doctor’s fee for open-heart surgery. Updates annually
What was Medicare Part B paid for in 2014?
This dataset provides details on payments made in 2014 through Medicare Part B to individual doctors and other health professionals for services as varied as office visits, ambulance mileage, lab tests, and the doctor’s fee for open-heart surgery.
How many people are covered by Medicare Part D?
Ready-to-use data on 1.4 billion prescriptions made under Medicare's popular prescription-drug program, Medicare Part D, which serves 41 million people and pays for more than 1/4 of prescriptions written nationwide.
How many administrative orders were issued in Pennsylvania between 1997 and 2016?
This unique data set aggregates information from nearly 900 administrative orders, between 1997 and 2016, to provide a detailed look at health and safety sanctions in Pennsylvania nursing homes. The data has been cleaned and verified by Reading Eagle reporters.
Does ProPublica pull out hospital violations?
While CMS releases data on all types of hospital violations, ProPublica's ER Inspector specifically pulls out the violations related to ER care. You can see all violations in the raw CMS data.
What is the lack of prescribing oversight?
One issue raised by ProPublica that is causing the lack of prescribing oversight is that Part D is different from other government funded health programs. Patients get their drugs through stand-alone drug plans, which cover only drugs, or through Medicare HMOs that also cover medical services.
How many prescriptions did Daniel Hurley have?
For example, while Indiana physician Daniel J. Hurley led the country with more than 160,000 prescriptions under Part D in 2010, he told ProPublica that nursing home pharmacies “had credited him with prescriptions by other health professionals in his practice, a quirk Medicare should want to address.”.
What is the first databank used by ProPublica?
After consulting with “dozens of experts” in various fields, ProPublica used First Databank, a company that sells and analyzes health information, to classify drugs by category, such as narcotics or antipsychotics.
How many prescriptions were written in 2010?
The data for 2010 includes 1.1 billion prescriptions written by 1.7 million doctors, nurses and other providers.
What is a prescriber in Medicare?
Prescribers include any health professional who wrote a prescription that was filled by a beneficiary in Medicare Part D. For each provider and drug, the data includes the total number of claims, including refills dispensed, the retail cost of the drug, the days of supply and the number of units (i.e. pills or ounces).
How many times can you see a drug on ProPublica?
Only drugs prescribed at least 50 times by a provider are shown. Patients can also search by drugs; ProPublica lists the 500 most-prescribed drugs in Part D, and if your drug is on the list, you can click to “view the top prescribers.”.
What is the ProPublica campaign?
In 2010, the “investigative journalist organization” known as ProPubilca, through donations from the Pew Foundation and several other organizations geared towards attacking industry, began the “Dollars for Docs” campaign. As we have covered extensively since the launch of that campaign, ProPublica aggregated the payment reporting data of approximately 15 manufacturers who were reporting their payments publicly—either as a requirement of a corporate integrity agreement (CIA) with HHS-OIG, or voluntarily—and then created a searchable, aggregated website.
Chicken Checker
Data on every salmonella testing sample collected at U.S. poultry processing plants.
ProPublica Congress API
The Congress API provides near real-time access to legislative data from the House of Representatives, the Senate and the Library of Congress. It includes details about members, votes, bills and other aspects of congressional activity.
Police Use of Force Reports (New Jersey)
This research-ready data set includes data on more than 70,000 police use-of-force incidents across all 468 New Jersey municipal police departments and the New Jersey State Police between 2012 and 2016.
NPI-Open Payments Crosswalk
A unique NPI-Open Payments crosswalk, which matches providers Open Payment IDs to their National Provider Identifier (NPI) number. Last updated October 3, 2019.
How much did Medicare prescribe in 2011?
High-dollar Prescribers Proliferate in Medicare’s Drug Program. Forty-one health providers prescribed more than $5 million in drugs in 2011. Last year, that jumped to 514. “The trends in this space are troubling and don’t show any signs of abating,” a federal official said. by Charles Ornstein and Ryann Grochowski Jones.
What are doctors prescribing?
What Doctors Are Prescribing. Never-before-released government prescription records shows that some doctors and other health professionals across the country prescribe large quantities of drugs known to be potentially harmful, disorienting or addictive for their patients. And officials have done little to detect or deter these hazardous prescribing ...
How much did Medicare spend on HIV drugs in 2012?
The inspector general of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services finds Medicare spent tens of millions of dollars in 2012 for HIV drugs there’s little evidence patients needed. A 77-year-old woman with no record of HIV got $33,500 of medication.
Why is Medicare failing to monitor what doctors are prescribing?
Medicare’s failure to monitor what doctors are prescribing has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars on excessive use of brand-name medication and exposed the elderly and disabled to drugs they should avoid.
Did Medicare cover more prescriptions in 2012 than 2011?
Despite warnings about abuse, Medicare covered more prescriptions for potent controlled substances in 2012 than it did in 2011. The program's top prescribers often have faced disciplinary action or criminal charges related to their medical practices.
Did Medicare find dangerous prescribing?
The move follows a ProPublica investigation showing that Medicare did little to find dangerous prescribing by doctors to seniors and the disabled. It is also part of the government’s new push to bring transparency to taxpayer-supported medical care.
Does Hawaii have fewer opioids?
Medicare patients in Hawaii take fewer opioid painkillers and fewer antibiotics, on average, than those in any other state. Physicians and health policy experts cite demographics and healthier lifestyles as possible reasons why.
