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In the Editor's Column from the June issue, you said that if our doctors have taken money from the drug industry, we should consider seeing another doctor. But how can we find out if our doctors have taken money from industry?
You may have a clue that your doctor accepts gifts from the drug industry if you see pens, posters and other paraphernalia in your doctor’s office with logos from major drug companies. But to get a more definitive answer, you can look to some helpful online...
In the Editor's Column from the June issue, you said that if our doctors have taken money from the drug industry, we should consider seeing another doctor. But how can we find out if our doctors have taken money from industry?
You may have a clue that your doctor accepts gifts from the drug industry if you see pens, posters and other paraphernalia in your doctor’s office with logos from major drug companies. But to get a more definitive answer, you can look to some helpful online tools.
One useful site for tracking this information is the government’s Open Payments database (https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/), which provides information on payments and gifts to doctors from the drug and medical device industries since August 2013. This database allows you to input your doctor’s name and view payments made for research and other purposes. You can then click on any individual payment to see details associated with that payment.
Another site making this information available is ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs database at https://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/. In addition to data from the Open Payments database, ProPublica has data on physician payments and gifts from 17 major drug manufacturers for various periods of time prior to August 2013 (see ProPublica's database archive at https://projects.propublica.org/d4d-archive/).
A final way to learn if your doctor accepts payments or gifts from the drug industry is to simply ask him or her.
