1/ Today we’re releasing the ninth update to Dollars for Docs, our database of payments made by drug and device makers to U.S. healthcare providers. You can now find payments through 2016. propub.li/2ySTjKJ
2/ Dollars for Docs has been published by ProPublica almost since our beginning, and it’s still one of the most important data sets we’re responsible for. Here’s some history behind it, from @kleinmatic:
3/ It started when @dancow, who was then a journalist-developer here, wrote a technical guide to web scraping. As an example, he found a list released by a pharmaceutical company of payments made to doctors and wrote a blog post about how he scraped it.
4/ The next morning, @charlesornstein, then a health care reporter, quite literally ran to Dan’s desk, excited to use the data for a story. But he had what seemed like a small request: Six other companies had posted similar disclosures. Could Dan scrape all of them?
5/ It ended up taking months, but in October 2010, we launched Dollars for Docs, the first free tool that let regular people search across many pharmaceutical companies for their own doctors to see what payments they had received. propub.li/2N7FPhp
6/ In the years since, many people at ProPublica have worked to keep Dollars for Docs up to date, inventing new processes and writing tens of thousands of lines of software code to do so.
7/ The government now releases the data (openpaymentsdata.cms.gov) — and requires every company to disclose its payments — but we still put it together to make it easier for others to understand and use.
8/ Millions of people have used our free database to check on their doctors. (We’re nearing 20m page views.) Hundreds of newsrooms around the country have published or broadcast their own deep investigations of local doctor payments, starting their investigations with our data.
9/ We’ve used the data to fuel our own reporting as well, finding among other things, a correlation between payments and a provider’s prescribing behavior — a relationship doctors had long denied. propub.li/2N4LtRk
10/ Our latest report by @charlesornstein and @ryanngro uses the data to show that drug makers have reduced their marketing efforts for opioids amidst a still-unfolding crisis. propub.li/2KydTBq
11/ The updated data, covering August 2013-December 2016, includes $9.15 billion in payments to more than 900,000 providers.
Is your doctor among them? propub.li/2ySTjKJ
Is your doctor among them? propub.li/2ySTjKJ
