Has this clinician been paid by drug or device companies?
Under the Physician Payments Sunshine Act every drug and device company must report to the federal government what it pays a clinician — a consulting fee, a conference flight, a royalty, a sandwich at a lunch meeting — and the government publishes all of it. This page reads that file. Enter a surname and state, or an NPI, and you get the totals by year, the companies that reported them, what the payments were for, the products named on the records, and the median for the same specialty in the same state so the dollar figure means something.
31,536,442 general payment records for 1,255,240 clinicians from 2,187 reporting companies, program years 2024 and 2025, plus the research payment and ownership files — which name a further 1,396 clinicians nobody reported a general payment for, and who are here too. Source: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Open Payments, published by CMS on 30 June 2026 and loaded into CivicDelta on 14 September 2026.
Read this before the numbers. These payments are legal, and they are on the public record because the law requires the company to report them — not because anyone did anything wrong. Working with a manufacturer is an ordinary part of medicine: running a trial, advising on a device design, teaching other doctors how to use one.
And most of what is in this file is lunch. 28,924,702 of the 31,536,442 records are food and beverage, totalling $857,567,032 — an average of $29.65 a record. Half of the clinicians on record have a two-year total of $223.84 or less. A payment is not evidence that a clinician’s judgement was affected, and this page does not rank anyone, score anyone, or describe any total as high or low. It shows what was reported and what the middle of the same specialty in the same state looks like. What you make of it is yours to decide — and the right place to raise it is with the clinician.
Look a clinician up
Nothing you type leaves your browser: the files are downloaded and searched on your own device, nothing is stored, and the clinician’s name never appears in the address bar, so a lookup cannot be shared or indexed.
What this doesn’t tell you
- It does not tell you whether a payment changed anything. Open Payments records money and its stated category. It records nothing about what was prescribed, implanted, recommended or refused, and neither do we. Anyone who tells you a dollar figure alone shows bias is telling you something the data cannot support.
- A big total is often research or a royalty. A royalty is paid to the person who invented the device; a research payment is usually money for a study, not personal income. Both are shown separately here for that reason.
- Absence is not proof. A clinician with no record here had nothing reported for them in 2024 or 2025 by a company covered by the law. The files we hold cover those two program years; CMS’s own search goes back to 2013.
- The state is the profile state. CMS publishes the state on the clinician’s Open Payments profile, which may not be where they practise now. Someone you cannot find in their state can still be found by NPI.
- Teaching hospitals are not here. CMS reports payments to teaching hospitals in the same files, against the hospital rather than against a clinician’s NPI: 72,957 records in the general payment file and 278,819 in the research payment file for these two program years. This tool covers only payments reported against an individual clinician’s NPI. CMS’s own search covers both.
- 669 clinicians can only be found by NPI. 433 appear in the payment files with an NPI and no published Open Payments profile at all, so we print no name for them rather than borrowing one from another register; a further 236 have a profile CMS publishes no state on, so they are in no state’s name list. Every one of them has a full record, reachable by NPI.
- It is a copy, loaded 14 September 2026. CMS republishes and corrects the file. CMS’s own Open Payments search is the live record and covers every program year since 2013.
What this free tool gives you, and what the $49 record adds
Every payment figure Open Payments publishes for a clinician is on this page, with the peer median beside it. Nothing is held back for the paid report. The Surgeon Record answers a different question — the one a patient with an operation already booked is actually asking:
- How often they do your operation. Medicare publishes, procedure code by procedure code, how many times each clinician billed for it; the report puts your surgeon’s volume for your procedure against the middle half of the same specialty in the same state.
- Their license and any public discipline, and their board certification — read on the boards’ own sites by a person for your order, and dated. No database can do that part.
- The payment record above, summarised into the same document, so the whole picture is on one printable page to take to the appointment.
The Surgeon Record · $49 · CMS’s own Open Payments search · Guide: reading the payments
About this lookup
Why does a clinician I know have no record here?
Because no company covered by the law reported paying them in program year 2024 or 2025 — the two years in the files we hold. That is the commonest result: 1,255,240 clinicians have at least one general payment on record, out of far more clinicians in practice. A further 1,396 are named only in the research payment or the ownership file; they have a record here, and it says in so many words that no general payment was reported for them. It can also mean the surname is filed differently, or the profile carries a different state; looking the NPI up directly settles both. A clinician can also ask us to take them out of this lookup (see Privacy); CMS’s own search, which covers every program year back to 2013, still shows their record.
Is a large total a warning sign?
No, and this page will not tell you it is. The largest totals in the file are royalties — money paid to the clinician who invented a device — and research payments, which are usually payments to a study rather than personal income. Both are separated out here so a $2 million royalty is not read as $2 million of meals. The peer median is there to give a raw figure some scale, not to set a line anyone is supposed to stay under.
How is the peer median worked out, and how big is the group?
We take every clinician whose Open Payments profile gives the same specialty and the same state and who has at least one general payment on record, total each one’s 2024 and 2025 general payments to the cent, and take the middle value. The page always prints how many clinicians are in that group. Where the group is smaller than 20 we publish the size and no median, because the middle of eleven people is not a peer group. Half of any group is above its median and half below, so being on either side of it is ordinary.
What does “disputed” mean on a record?
CMS publishes each record as the reporting company submitted it. Where the clinician and the company do not agree that a record is accurate, the clinician can flag it and CMS marks it disputed; it stays published while the two sides resolve it, and CMS does not itself verify the amounts. It is rare — 420 of the 31,536,442 general payment records here carry the flag — but it is not rare for every clinician, and the page gives each one its own count rather than repeating that average over their record. Where any of a clinician’s records are flagged, this page says so and says how many.
Why is most of the money in such small amounts?
Because most records are a meal at a meeting. 28,924,702 of the 31,536,442 records are in CMS’s “Food and Beverage” category, totalling $857,567,032 — an average of $29.65 each. That is why the page shows what the payments were for as well as how much they came to: ten years of sandwiches and one consulting contract are different facts, and a single total hides the difference.
What is a product doing next to a payment?
Companies name a covered drug or device on some records and leave it blank on others; 11,763 distinct product names appear across these records. A product listed here means a record named it — for example a dinner held to discuss it. It does not mean the clinician prescribes it, implants it or recommends it, and we do not infer that.
Where do I check this against the source?
Every clinician’s record here links straight to the same NPI on CMS’s Open Payments search, which is the live record and shows each individual payment rather than our totals. The underlying files are downloadable there in full. We hold program years 2024 and 2025, published by CMS on 30 June 2026 and loaded on 14 September 2026.
Every dataset we hold, with its load date · how a record is checked before it reaches a page