Open Payments Scraper: Pharma and Device Payments to Doctors and Hospitals

This scraper reads CMS Open Payments, the federal Sunshine Act database that lists every payment drug and medical device companies make to doctors, other practitioners and teaching hospitals. Search payments by doctor, NPI number, state, specialty, company, product or payment type, then export clean rows to CSV or Excel. Program years 2019 to 2025 are covered.

The main difference from other Open Payments tools is that the numbers arrive ready to use. Besides single payments you get totals per doctor and year with the specialty median next to them, a ranking of the paying companies, totals per teaching hospital, and benchmarks per specialty and state. A payment row lists every related drug or device with its therapeutic area, and doctor rows are already parsed into specialty group, specialty and sub specialty.

Journalists, compliance teams, medical sales groups, pharma analysts and researchers use it to see who pays whom and how much.

What can you find in Open Payments data?

• Individual payments: date, amount, form of payment, nature of payment (food and beverage, consulting fee, speaker fee, travel, education, royalty, grant, gift and more), paying company, related products and the full recipient profile with address, license states and NPI.
• Doctor totals per year: general payments, research payments, ownership and investment interests, number of transactions, average payment size and how many times the specialty median the doctor received.
• Company totals and ranking: general and research dollars per company and year, share of research versus general spending, transactions to doctors, other practitioners and teaching hospitals.
• Teaching hospital totals: general and research payments per hospital with address and CMS certification number.
• Specialty benchmarks: number of doctors paid, total, mean and median amounts per specialty and year.
• State benchmarks: totals, means and medians per state and year.

How to search who pays a doctor

1. Choose Individual payments or Doctor totals per year.
2. Enter the years, then a last name, a first name or one or more NPI numbers.
3. Add a state, a specialty or a company to narrow the list.
4. Run it and download the table.

Names are matched exactly in capital letters, so Smith finds SMITH. Company names, specialties and product names match any part of the text.

Input example

{
    "mode": "payments",
    "years": ["2024"],
    "companies": ["Pfizer"],
    "states": ["NY"],
    "natureOfPayment": ["Consulting Fee"],
    "maxItems": 200
}

Output example

A payment row from 2024 (name shortened for this example):

{
    "recordId": 1132014080,
    "programYear": 2024,
    "paymentDate": "2024-07-25",
    "amount": 1110,
    "formOfPayment": "Cash or cash equivalent",
    "natureOfPayment": "Consulting Fee",
    "recipientType": "Covered Recipient Non-Physician Practitioner",
    "npi": "1851720551",
    "specialtyGroup": "Physician Assistants & Advanced Practice Nursing Providers",
    "specialty": "Nurse Practitioner",
    "city": "New York",
    "state": "NY",
    "companyName": "PFIZER INC.",
    "isConsultingOrSpeaker": true,
    "disputed": false,
    "products": []
}

A doctor total row for a family medicine doctor in North Carolina shows 161.66 dollars in 10 payments, which is 1.31 times the specialty median of 123.67 dollars. In the company ranking for 2024 the first company has 676 million dollars of mostly research spending, with a general payment share of 2.9 percent.

Why use this scraper?

• Six views of the same database in one place, from single payments to state benchmarks.
• Specialty medians next to every doctor total, so a high number is easy to put in context.
• Numbers are numbers. Amounts, counts and dates are real numeric and date values, not text.
• Products as a list, with drug or device type, therapeutic area, NDC code and device identifier.
• Derived flags for food and beverage, consulting or speaker payments, disputed records, delayed publication and third party payments.
• Several years in one run, and several companies in one run.

Who uses Open Payments data?

• Reporters who follow money between industry and medicine.
• Hospital and health system compliance teams checking disclosures.
• Pharma and device market researchers who study competitor spending by specialty and region.
• Medical sales teams looking for the doctors who work with a given product category.
• Academics who study conflicts of interest.

Frequently asked questions

Does a payment mean a doctor did something wrong? No. Open Payments is a disclosure program. A meal, a consulting fee and a research grant all appear in the same database.

How current is the data? CMS publishes the previous calendar year each June. Program year 2025 is included now.

Why does a search take a while? The source holds several million payments per year. Searches with an NPI, a last name or a company are fast. Broad searches with only a state take longer.

Why do I get only 10 rows? Free runs return up to 10 rows as a preview. Paid plans return up to one million rows.

Can I get research payments and ownership interests? Doctor totals include research payments and ownership or investment amounts. Company and hospital totals include them as well.

Is the doctor's name spelled in capital letters? Names come in capital letters from the source. This scraper converts them to normal capitalization in the output.

Data source and limits

Data comes from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Open Payments program and is public. Detailed payment records are the general payment files. Research and ownership records are included in the totals but not listed one by one. Amounts are as reported by the companies and may be disputed or revised later. Medical specialties come from the profile of the doctor in the year of the payment.