Every year the pharmaceutical industry showers doctors with billions of dollars of cash and gift for a chance to win over their prescription pads. Whether it be food, travel, gifts, or licensing fees each payment must be disclosed to the Centers of Medicare & Medicaid Services. In 2014, the government decided to make this information publicly available as a part of a dataset called Open Payments.

I wanted to dive in to not only see how much these companies are paying doctors but also if money really does talk. Utilizing other datasets also publicly available through the Centers of Medicare & Medicaid Services, I analyzed more than 40 million payments and 95 million prescriptions to uncover if lining doctors' pockets affected the number of brand-name medications they prescribed. With over 30 GB in CSV files, I was able to find trends within certain specialties displaying statistically significant differences in the number of brand name prescriptions written by doctors receiving payments versus their colleagues who were not receiving payments.

Read an in-depth explanation of this project

Find out how much your doctor was paid

See what I discovered in my analysis

Download the raw data I used