CMS Open Payments · Original analysis
Data vintage: · General Payments only
The short answer
Among 765 companies with at least 25 recorded recipients and $100,000 in CMS-reported General Payments, BioNTech SE has the highest recipient-concentration score in Program Year 2024. Its HHI is 9,959, and its largest recorded recipient accounts for 99.8% of its General Payments. This describes the distribution of reported payments, not conduct, prescribing, clinical quality, or wrongdoing.
What this measure means
The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, or HHI, summarizes how evenly a company's reported General Payments are distributed across its individual recipients. It runs from near zero, where payments are spread broadly, to 10,000, where one recipient receives all of the recorded amount. The U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission use 2,500 as a reference threshold for a highly concentrated market; here it is only a descriptive reference for a payment-recipient distribution, not a market definition or legal finding.
To avoid ranking tiny one-recipient records that mechanically score 10,000, this analysis includes companies with at least 25 recorded individual recipients and at least $100,000 in General Payments. The complete unfiltered concentration table remains available in the open data catalogue.
Highest recipient-concentration scores, Program Year 2024
Top 10 companies in the explicit 765-company analytic cohort
The highest-concentration companies in the analytic cohort
The cohort median HHI is 519. 90 companies meet or exceed the 2,500 descriptive reference point; this is not a misconduct or risk classification.
| Company | HHI | Largest-recipient share | Recipients | General Payments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BioNTech SE | 9,959 | 99.8% | 54 | $181M |
| Purdue Pharma L.P. | 9,551 | 97.7% | 240 | $1.9M |
| Henry Schein, Inc. | 9,520 | 97.6% | 2,038 | $27.4M |
| BSN Medical Inc | 9,445 | 97.2% | 278 | $445,434 |
| VisionCare Inc. | 9,376 | 96.8% | 34 | $175,575 |
| AstraZeneca AB | 9,332 | 96.6% | 34 | $1.6M |
| Emmaus Medical, Inc. | 8,631 | 92.9% | 236 | $197,884 |
| Veryan Medical Incorporated | 8,362 | 91.4% | 144 | $359,173 |
| LivaNova USA, Inc. | 7,836 | 88.5% | 3,077 | $19.7M |
| Elekta, Inc. | 7,371 | 85.6% | 363 | $3.2M |
Compare two company profiles
A high concentration score is useful context, not a verdict. Use the comparison tool to see two companies' reported totals, payment-category mix, recipient counts, and concentration figures side by side.
Compare two companiesSource: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services CMS Open Payments Public Use Files, General Payments · 2024 Reported payments document disclosed financial relationships. This analysis does not determine clinical quality, prescribing, conduct, or wrongdoing.
What this analysis cannot tell us
A concentrated payment distribution can reflect many source-record patterns, including research activity, a teaching-hospital payment, a limited product portfolio, or reporting structure. It does not establish why a payment was made, whether a clinical decision was appropriate, or whether any party acted improperly. Read each company profile with its payment categories, recipient count, and the underlying CMS records.
Related data
Every figure on PlainPharmaWatch is rendered directly from federal source data, no number is typed in by an editor. This analysis calculates recipient-distribution HHI and largest-recipient share from CMS-reported General Payments records. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.