Tool
how your doctor gets paid
Since 2013, federal law has required drug and device companies to report what they pay physicians. Almost nobody looks. This is the lookup: type a name, see the 2024 record — consulting fees, speaking, meals, travel — straight from CMS’s own database.
Read this first: a payment is a fact, not a verdict. Most entries are small — a catered office lunch counts. The population-level research on what industry contact does to prescribing lives on who funds your doctor’s education; it cannot convict an individual, and neither can this page.
Common questions
- Where does this data come from?
- Directly from CMS’s Open Payments program — the federal database the Physician Payments Sunshine Act created in 2013. Drug and device manufacturers are legally required to report payments and transfers of value to physicians; we query CMS’s own API live and add nothing to it. Program year 2024, published June 2026.
- My doctor took payments. Does that mean their advice is biased?
- Not by itself, and this page will not tell you it does. A payment is a fact, not a verdict. The research on industry contact and prescribing shows an association at the population level — physicians with more industry contact prescribe more, and more expensively, on average — but it cannot convict any individual. The honest use of this lookup is as a conversation starter: "I saw you’ve done paid speaking for the company that makes the drug you’re recommending — walk me through the alternatives?" is a fair question, and a good doctor will not mind it.
- What is the difference between a $40 meal entry and a $40,000 speaking entry?
- Scale and role. Food-and-beverage entries are mostly rep visits — a catered office lunch, divided among everyone present. Consulting and speaking fees are direct compensation for work with the company. The research finding worth knowing: even small meals correlate with prescribing changes at the population level, which is why they must be reported at all. But treating a sandwich and a speaker contract as morally identical would be innumerate; the breakdown exists so you can see which kind your doctor’s entries are.
- My doctor is not in here at all. What does that mean?
- Most likely: no reportable payments in 2024 — which describes many physicians. Also possible: name spelling differences (the database uses legal names), payments below reporting thresholds, or a recipient type the Sunshine Act does not cover. Absence of an entry is a good sign, not proof of purity; presence is a fact, not an accusation.
Source
CMS Open Payments, program year 2024 (published June 2026), queried live via the openpaymentsdata.cms.gov API: the per-recipient summary dataset joined with recipient profiles. Payment-nature labels were verified against the underlying 2024 General Payment records. This tool shows physician (individual) payments only; research and ownership payments are separate datasets on the CMS site.