Health care companies enter into financial relationships with doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers. The Sunshine Act requires them to disclose these relationships. A previous analysis uncovered a correlation between payments to doctors and the likelihood of prescribing a brand name drug. We’ll repeat this analysis and release the full data to the public. Additionally, we will reanalyze the data and attempt to identify factors that can help explain the observed effects.
Health care companies frequently enter into financial relationships with doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers. These relationship are often in the form of speaking fees, research, gifts, or meals. Doctors also can invest in the products of pharmaceutical products, and potentially receive a share of the profits in procedures or drugs they prescribe. The Open Payments data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services was recently released online, and discloses these financial relationships to the public.
ProPublica revealed that doctors who receive payments are, on average, more likely to prescribe a higher percentage of brand-name drugs. This analysis showed a correlation, however, it doesn’t prove causality. We will dig into this data more deeply and investigate possible explanations for the observed effects.
We will additionally integrate other external data sources, including data on hospital of care and physician quality of care, in order to investigate the correlation between brand name prescriptions, doctor payments, and general health outcomes of the patients.
We need to redo the ProPublica analysis, because it was never released to the public. Once this is done, we will release it under an open source license. Several data fields need to be normalize and standardized in order to allow us to cross-reference this data across databases.
We will build a robust statistical model using many additional factors that weren’t considered by the ProPublica analysis including hospital affiliation, drug class and usage, and the patients diseases they are being treated for.