Is Your Doctor Taking Money from Drug Companies?

A new website lets you search for your doctors and find out how much money they've been paid or gifted by pharmaceutical companies.

Sometimes, doctors and hospitals have a tight financial relationship with health care manufacturing companies. These relationships can include money for research activities, gifts, speaking fees, free meals, or even exotic travel.

Some have argued that these financial relationships are a conflict of interest, making it appear that drug companies are rewarding doctors for prescribing their lucrative drugs to patients. Others in the healthcare industry say that doctors have the right to make money for providing research and access to drug companies.

The Open Payments database was created as part of part of the Obamacare law. Until recently, the money received from pharmaceutical companies has been very secretive. But now, doctors and drug companies must legally report this money. According to the Open Payments website, knowing more about the relationship between your doctor and drug companies does a few things:

• Encourages transparency about these financial ties
• Provides information on the nature and extent of the relationships
• Helps to identify relationships  that can both lead to the development of beneficial new technologies and wasteful healthcare spending
• Helps to prevent inappropriate influence on research, education and clinical decision making

Check out the searchable database for yourself. You can look up any doctor and see how much money and/or gifts they've received over the past few months. As time goes on, more information will be added. If you see large sums of money being paid to your doctor from a drug company, you may want to talk to them about why they've received it and how that financial relationship may or may not affect the drugs they're prescribing to you.