How much do pharmaceutical companies spend on your physicians?
US laws disallow pharmaceutical companies to directly market to patients (the reason behind all those "Ask your doctor about ...." commercials).
However, they can still interact with physicians through various research and non-research related activities (including sponsored vacations to Hawaii).
This project aims to inform the reader about the magnitude of spending being done on physicians at national, state-wide and physician levels.
Hint: The national level figure is more than the final Democratic offer to Trump to finance his border wall.
While the state-level mean spending seem reasonable, total payments on physicians vary widely.
Pharmaceutical companies spend more than $1 million on 134 physicians in 2017.
While most of these 134 physicians (95+) amassed much of these spending in the form of royalty/ licensing fees as a result of sales of drugs they helped develop, the actual spending types varied from one physician to another.
The visualization below provides a sense of the differences in these spending from one physician to another.
References:
1) CMS Openpayments 2017 data: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/browse
2) Background about Sunshine Act: https://www.pm360online.com/the-who-what-when-and-why-of-the-sunshine-act/
3) CMS' summary visualizations: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/summary
Link to final presentation: Here
