PlainPharmaWatch

About PlainPharmaWatch

Our Mission

Financial relationships between pharmaceutical companies and healthcare providers are a normal part of modern medicine — funding research, supporting education, and advancing medical knowledge. But understanding the scale, patterns, and distribution of these payments is important for patients, journalists, and policymakers. We built PlainPharmaWatch because we believe this transparency should be easy to access.

The Physician Payments Sunshine Act requires pharmaceutical and medical device companies to report transfers of value to physicians and teaching hospitals. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) publishes this data through the Open Payments program — but the raw dataset contains millions of individual transaction records that are difficult to search without specialized tools.

PlainPharmaWatch transforms this data into searchable company profiles, state summaries, and recipient lookups. We believe that making payment data accessible serves the public interest by enabling informed conversations about healthcare spending.

Receiving payments is legal and common — our goal is not to imply wrongdoing, but to provide the transparency that the Sunshine Act was designed to deliver. Whether you are a patient researching your physician, a journalist investigating industry spending patterns, or a researcher studying healthcare economics, PlainPharmaWatch gives you the data in a usable format.

What We Track

PlainPharmaWatch organizes pharmaceutical payment data into several browsable categories:

  • Companies — 1,729 pharmaceutical and medical device companies with total payments, transaction counts, and payment type breakdowns
  • States — Payment totals by state for physicians and teaching hospitals across 16 payment categories
  • Payment Types — 16 categories including consulting fees, food and beverage, research, travel, gifts, royalties, education, and more
  • Top Recipients — The 10,000 highest-paid physicians and teaching hospitals nationwide with individual payment breakdowns
  • Company-Recipient Links — Which companies pay which doctors and hospitals the most, enabling cross-referencing

Our Data Sources

All data on PlainPharmaWatch comes from the CMS Open Payments program, a federal initiative mandated by the Physician Payments Sunshine Act (Section 6002 of the Affordable Care Act). Open Payments tracks payments and transfers of value from pharmaceutical and medical device companies to physicians and teaching hospitals.

We use four primary CMS data products, all covering Program Year 2024:

  • Reporting Organization Summary — Company-level aggregates showing total payments, transaction counts, and year-over-year trends for all 1,729 reporting companies
  • Company by Payment Type Detail — Detailed breakdown of each company's spending across 16 payment categories
  • Payment Type by State Summary — Geographic distribution of payments across all 50 states, showing regional pharmaceutical spending patterns for both physician and teaching hospital recipients
  • Recipient by Payment Type Summary — Individual recipient-level data covering approximately 1.2 million physician and teaching hospital records with payment type breakdowns

All datasets are downloaded directly from the CMS Open Payments data portal at download.cms.gov/openpayments/. These are the same data files used by academic researchers and investigative journalists nationwide.

Key Terms

Understanding Open Payments data requires familiarity with several key terms used by CMS:

  • AMGPO — Applicable Manufacturer or Group Purchasing Organization, the company making payments
  • Covered Recipient — A physician or teaching hospital receiving payments
  • General Payments — Direct payments for consulting, food, travel, gifts, education, and other non-research purposes
  • Research Payments — Payments related to research activities and clinical trials
  • Ownership Interest — Payments related to ownership or investment interests held by physicians in companies

How We Process the Data

Our ETL pipeline downloads the annual CMS Open Payments summary CSV files and processes them through several stages:

  • Parsing — Large CSV files (the recipient summary contains approximately 1.2 million rows) are streamed and parsed with company identifiers, recipient identifiers, state codes, and payment categories normalized
  • Aggregation — Individual payment records are aggregated by company, by state, and by recipient to produce searchable summaries
  • Top Recipients — We identify and index the 10,000 highest-paid physicians and teaching hospitals. Smaller payments are included in aggregate totals but do not have individual profiles
  • Company-Recipient Links — Cross-reference tables connect companies to their highest-paid recipients and vice versa
  • Rankings — Company and state rankings are computed across six categories including total payments, transaction counts, and per-physician averages
  • Indexing — Database indexes on company slugs, state codes, and payment amounts enable fast retrieval

All dollar amounts are taken directly from CMS data without adjustment. We do not apply inflation corrections, per-capita normalization, or any statistical modeling. Company profiles show exactly what was reported to CMS.

Data Currency

CMS publishes Open Payments data annually, typically in the summer for the preceding program year. The current dataset covers Program Year 2024. CMS also provides a review cycle where companies and recipients can dispute and correct records before final publication.

We update our database when CMS publishes new annual releases. The Open Payments timeline is typically: data collection closes in spring, a review period follows, and the final dataset is published by June or July.

Payment data for the current calendar year will not be available until the following year's release cycle. Historical data from previous program years is available from CMS but we focus on the most recent year for clarity.

Editorial Independence

Content on PlainPharmaWatch is compiled by our editorial team. Raw data from CMS, HHS, CDC, FDA, and HRSA is transformed into readable profiles by our continuous editorial pipeline, validated against the source before publication. The PlainPharmaWatch editorial team, operating under Kiznis Studio, is responsible for editorial standards, methodology, and corrections.

We do not accept payment, sponsorship, or promoted placement from providers, hospitals, manufacturers, or any healthcare entity. Our only revenue source is contextual display advertising served by Google AdSense — advertisers do not influence which entities we cover or how we present data, and they do not receive preferential placement.

Limitations and Disclaimers

PlainPharmaWatch is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to CMS or any federal agency. This site is for informational purposes only and does not provide medical advice.

  • Payments do not imply wrongdoing — Receiving payments is legal, common, and often beneficial. Many payments fund research, education, and clinical consulting
  • Top 10,000 recipients only — Individual profiles are shown for the highest-paid recipients. Others are included in aggregate totals only
  • Company-reported data — Payment amounts reflect what companies reported to CMS. Some records may be disputed or corrected in subsequent releases
  • General payments focus — Our company and state profiles focus primarily on general payments. Research payments are tracked separately
  • Annual data only — Payments made in the current calendar year will not appear until the following year's release
  • No medical advice — Payment data should be considered as one factor among many when evaluating healthcare relationships

Always consult qualified healthcare providers for medical decisions. This site does not replace professional medical consultation.

Contact

Questions, feedback, or data inquiries? Reach out at hello@plainpharmawatch.com. We welcome inquiries from patients, researchers, journalists, and healthcare professionals.

PlainPharmaWatch is published by ", a data intelligence company that builds free, public-interest data portals. We transform complex government datasets into accessible, searchable resources for researchers, journalists, policymakers, and the public.