When you don’t accept big pharma money: a look at my own CMS opendata information.

If you are gonna talk the talk you gotta walk the walk. I have discussed many times the corruption of healthcare providers and the amount of money they take from big pharma. I have promised all of you that I am NOT one of those people. Some of you reading this know me personally as a provider, so I wanted to be clear and transparent to everyone that reads my daily posts that what I write on here does indeed line up with how I practice as a provider every single day. CMS Opendata is where all pharma companies dump their data for providers and how much money they make from big pharma. The opendata I posted the other day for the physician in St. Louis shows he accepted over $600k from pharma. The data release to the public is severely delayed, 2023 data will be out sometime in August 2024, and I will share mine again when that is posted. So the most up to date data we have is 2022. Below is mine.

As you can see, I signed for and ate 2 meals paid for by pharma in 2022. Alkermes was launching a new drug, and I attended the luncheon to learn more about that new medication. Otsuka brought in a pharmacist/PhD to answer questions about issues or side effects we may be having with their medication, so I attended that lunch to be able to ask questions I wanted some answers to. Both of these luncheons were beneficial to me as a provider and to my patients, as I was able to learn new and relevant information that translates into treatment for my patients. It falls into continuing education, which every provider should be doing every single year.

Calendar year 2023 data should be the same, I think I attended 1 lunch, but when that data rolls out in 6-9 months, I will share it.

Big pharma does not own all of us. I am proud to be one of them. ❤️