About DocDollars

A free, fast, no-login front end for a federal database that deserves a better one.

Why this exists

Since 2013 the US government has published every reportable payment drug and device companies make to physicians. It is one of the most useful transparency datasets in American healthcare. It is also, in its native form, close to unusable: you pick a dataset, apply filters, and get a table.

ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs filled that gap for a decade and has been retired. DocDollars is an attempt to fill it again, with the same discipline about context and a great deal more speed.

The one design rule

Never show a number without saying what kind of number it is. A physician with $4,000 in catered lunches and a physician with $4,000 in speaker fees have different relationships with industry, and a site that renders them identically is producing misinformation with accurate arithmetic. Every profile here leads with a plain sentence about the composition of the total, before the total is broken down at all.

What it costs

Nothing, to you. There is no account, no paywall, no email capture and no data sold. The site is supported by advertising and runs on a single edge worker with no database, which makes it cheap enough to keep free.

What it is not

It is not an accusation engine. A payment record is a disclosure. Most of this data is sandwiches. Read the evidence on prescribing before drawing conclusions, and the limits of the data before drawing strong ones.

Corrections and contact

Data errors belong with CMS. Display errors belong with us.