About & methodology
Doctor Payments Datajoins four federal datasets on the National Provider Identifier to build one page per U.S. clinician: what drug and device makers reported paying them, what they billed Medicare, and what they prescribed. It exists because the best-known version of this — ProPublica's Dollars for Docs — stopped updating in 2019, and CMS's own portal is a data warehouse rather than something a patient can read.
Sources
- CMS Open Payments — payments reported under the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, program years 2019–2025 (publication P06302026_06032026).
- Medicare Physician & Other Practitioners — Part B fee-for-service billing, data year 2024.
- Medicare Part D Prescribers — prescribing volume and cost, data year 2024.
- NPPES NPI Registry — provider identity and registration status, July 2026, refreshed monthly.
All four are public-domain U.S. government records. We publish aggregates computed from them; nothing is estimated, modelled or imputed. Download URLs are resolved from CMS's own discovery APIs at refresh time rather than hardcoded, so a new CMS release is picked up rather than missed.
How identity works
Clinicians are identified by NPI, never by name. Thousands of NPIs share common names, and merging them would attribute one person's record to another — the worst failure this site could have. Companies are keyed by their CMS reporting-entity ID and grouped for display under their corporate parent, so a manufacturer that files under eight entities gets one page rather than eight weak ones, with the constituent entities disclosed.
What we refuse to publish
- A bare payment total. Every figure ships with its composition. General, research and ownership payments are never summed together — they are different kinds of fact.
- Medicare figures labelled as income. They are Part B allowed amounts: fee-for-service only, gross of all practice costs, and censored below eleven beneficiaries.
- Prescribing cost presented as the prescriber's money. It is paid to pharmacies. The prescriber receives none of it.
- Practice street addresses. City and state are enough, and many solo practitioners register a home address.
- Discipline or malpractice data. Different reliability class, categorically higher risk next to money data. Out of scope.
Coverage
2,050,659providers have a page — everyone with at least one Open Payments, Medicare Part B or Part D record. Clinicians with none of those do not appear. Pages carrying very little data are published and searchable but are not submitted to search engines, because a page with nothing on it is not worth anyone's time.
Corrections
Errors we introduced, we fix. Corrections and disputes →
Maintained by Doctor Payments Data Research Team. Not affiliated with CMS, ProPublica, or any company named on this site. Last reviewed July 27, 2026.