Open Payments

In response to the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has been disseminating information about payments and gifts that companies give to providers, starting around 2014. Payments and gifts could take many forms, such as an honoraria for speaking, ownership stakes in joint ventures, or even simply meals. CMS has been releasing subsequent data annually. We are pleased to announce that earlier this week, we released our first integration of this data with provider profiles on our site.

The Physician Payments Sunshine Act was passed in response to concerns that pharmaceutical and medical device companies might be unduly influencing doctors to prescribe certain medications or devices, even when such prescriptions might not be in the best interests of the patients.

You can see the source data via CMS' OpenPayments site. While CMS' site has interesting tools to explore the data through different angles, it lacks the functionality of a general doctor finder website. We believe that this data can be helpful to patients in potentially uncovering conflicts of interest, and that this integration is a more natural way for patients to learn more about their prospective providers.