Methodology & Data
IndustryPayments is a public-records mirror of the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Open Payments program. It presents records that CMS already publishes, organized for search and reading. It does not create, verify, score, rank, rate, or interpret those records, and it does not state or imply that any reported relationship is improper.
This page explains where the data comes from, what it does and does not mean, how figures are labeled, how entities are grouped, which pages are featured, how often data is refreshed, the known limitations, and how corrections are handled.
What Open Payments is
Open Payments is a federal transparency program established by Section 6002 of the Affordable Care Act (the Physician Payments Sunshine Act) and implemented under 42 CFR Parts 402 and 403. It requires applicable manufacturers of drugs, devices, biologicals, and medical supplies — and applicable group purchasing organizations (GPOs) — to report certain payments, transfers of value, and ownership or investment interests involving covered recipients: physicians, certain non-physician practitioners (such as physician assistants and nurse practitioners), and teaching hospitals.
CMS collects these submissions, gives covered recipients a period to review and dispute records before publication, and then publishes the data for public access. CMS states that the existence of a financial relationship in Open Payments does not necessarily indicate an improper relationship, that it maintains an impartial role, and that the data is open to individual interpretation. IndustryPayments mirrors that framing without adding to it.
Source of the data
All data on IndustryPayments comes from CMS Open Payments public-use files and related CMS-published resources (CMS Open Payments). IndustryPayments republishes CMS-published fields and adds only neutral display structure — searchable pages, record tables, filters, and category breakdowns — to make the public records easier to locate and read. That structure is a presentation aid, not an editorial judgment about any person, institution, company, product, or payment.
CMS publishes records by program year, which generally corresponds to the calendar year in which a payment, transfer of value, or ownership/investment interest occurred. CMS publishes each program year’s complete dataset on or before June 30 of the following year — after the reporting submission window and the covered-recipient review-and-dispute period — and refreshes the data, incorporating later corrections and dispute resolutions, in January.
Currently loaded: General Payments, program years 2018–2024 (the CMS January 2026 publication snapshot). Research payments and ownership/investment interests are not yet loaded; when they are, they will be shown as separate categories and never combined with these figures.
What a record means — and does not mean
A record on IndustryPayments means that CMS published a reported payment, transfer of value, or ownership/investment interest for the stated category and program year. It does not, by itself, establish that the relationship was improper, clinically significant, influential, unusual, or relevant to any patient’s care. IndustryPayments does not infer motive, quality of care, medical judgment, prescribing behavior, institutional policy, or ethical standing from any record.
Open Payments is not a complete account of a provider, company, or hospital. It is not a clinical-quality, disciplinary, malpractice, or prescribing database, and it is not an endorsement or ranking system.
- The presence of a record does not mean wrongdoing. Many reported relationships serve ordinary professional purposes — research, education, consulting on product design and safety, royalties, or a meal during an informational session.
- The absence of a record does not necessarily mean no relationship existed. It may mean no CMS record matched the entity, the record falls outside the data snapshot currently loaded here, the payment was excluded under CMS reporting rules, publication was delayed, the record was deleted or removed in CMS’s process, or the entity is not covered by the program.
Interpretation belongs to the reader.
The three categories
Open Payments organizes records into three legally and operationally distinct categories, which CMS reports and publishes separately:
General payments — payments or transfers of value not made in connection with a research agreement or protocol. Examples include food and beverage, travel and lodging, consulting fees, honoraria, education, gifts, and royalties or licenses. The CMS “nature of payment” classification applies to general payments.
Research payments — payments or transfers of value made in connection with a research agreement or protocol, such as a clinical trial. A research payment frequently represents funding routed through an institution or study site to cover trial operations, recruitment, laboratory resources, and staff, rather than personal compensation to a named principal investigator.
Ownership or investment interests — ownership or investment held by a physician, or an immediate family member of a physician, in an applicable manufacturer or GPO (for example, stock, stock options, or other equity). This category applies to physicians and their immediate family members; it does not apply to non-physician practitioners or teaching hospitals in the same way. These are holdings, not payments for services, meals, travel, research, or speaking.
Why the categories are never combined into one total
IndustryPayments never sums general payments, research payments, and ownership/investment interests into a single “total.”
The three categories measure fundamentally different things — a transfer of value, research funding (often institutional), and an equity holding are not interchangeable units. Adding them into one headline number would imply an equivalence and a precision that the underlying records do not support, and could misrepresent the nature of a provider’s reported relationships.
Where IndustryPayments shows dollar figures, each is labeled with its own category and read on its own terms. Category-specific figures may appear near one another for convenience, but “General payments, Program Year 2024,” “Research payments, Program Year 2024,” and “Ownership/investment interests, Program Year 2024” are three separate facts and are presented as three separate facts.
How every figure is labeled
No figure on IndustryPayments appears as a bare number. Every amount and count carries the context needed to read it:
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Category | General payments, research payments, or ownership/investment interest |
| Program year | The calendar year in which the reported activity occurred |
| Nature of payment | The CMS reason classification — general payments only; it does not apply to research or ownership/investment records |
| Record count | The number of individual reported records behind the figure |
| As-of date | The CMS publication snapshot this site’s data was imported from |
Entity grouping and disambiguation
IndustryPayments groups records to a provider or organization using CMS-published identifiers and fields — CMS Open Payments profile identifiers, the National Provider Identifier (NPI) where present, names, specialties, license states, and location fields for providers; CMS teaching-hospital identifiers for hospitals; and CMS reporting-entity identifiers for companies.
A shared name is not treated as proof that two records describe the same person or organization. Where the CMS-published fields do not support a confident grouping, IndustryPayments keeps records separate, shows disambiguating detail, or does not create a featured page. Grouping is a display function to make records findable; it is not a legal determination of identity. Anyone needing precise identification — especially for common names or multi-state practitioners — should confirm against the official CMS search tool and primary-source identifiers.
Which pages are featured
IndustryPayments presents a subset of subjects as featured, search-indexed pages. The threshold is neutral and mechanical: a subject receives a featured page when its records across the loaded program years meet a minimum substance level — currently at least 3 reported records, or at least $100 in reported value, in that category across the loaded program years.
This is a presentation and usability choice to avoid thin or ambiguous pages. It is not a judgment about importance, reputation, propriety, specialty, or public interest, and it does not withhold any data: records that fall below the featured-page threshold remain available through search and record views.
Refresh cadence and as-of dates
IndustryPayments periodically imports CMS-published data and rebuilds its indexes to follow the CMS publication cycle (annual publication by June 30, with a January refresh). Each page is a snapshot of the CMS data loaded as of the displayed as-of date. Later CMS publications, refreshes, corrections, deletions, or dispute-status changes appear here only after a subsequent import. When CMS changes a record, IndustryPayments reflects the change after its next successful refresh.
Known limitations
- Open Payments data is reported by applicable manufacturers and GPOs and attested to by them. CMS applies validation and matching and provides a review-and-dispute period, but does not independently audit every transaction. IndustryPayments does not independently verify the records.
- Records may be disputed, corrected, delayed, deleted, removed, or republished through CMS’s process. Where CMS publishes dispute status, change type, publication date, or deletion metadata, IndustryPayments displays it.
- Certain payments are excluded from reporting under CMS rules. Some research records are eligible for delayed publication. Records affected by unresolved disputes at a cutoff may publish with a disputed status.
- Early program years used different reporting thresholds, definitions, covered-recipient types, and fields. IndustryPayments preserves program-year context rather than forcing all years into one uniform meaning.
- Identifying fields are shown as CMS publishes them, or normalized only for readability (formatting, casing, whitespace, grouping); normalization does not change the underlying record.
What this site is not
IndustryPayments.org is not a consumer reporting agency as defined by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Do not use this site to determine any person’s eligibility for employment, credentialing, insurance, credit, housing, or any other purpose covered by the FCRA.
Corrections and disputes
IndustryPayments is not the system of record for Open Payments. CMS and the reporting entities control the underlying data.
- If a CMS record is inaccurate, incomplete, misattributed, or missing, the correction must be made through the official CMS Open Payments review-and-dispute process (CMS review-and-dispute process). Covered recipients and reporting entities use CMS’s channels; IndustryPayments cannot change a CMS record.
- If IndustryPayments reproduced a record incorrectly, grouped it under the wrong page, or failed to reflect a CMS correction after a refresh, report the display error (email corrections@industrypayments.org) and IndustryPayments will correct its mirror, grouping, formatting, or refresh status.
IndustryPayments does not remove accurate, CMS-published public records on request, and does not offer paid removal, suppression, de-indexing, or expedited handling of any kind. Payment, business relationship, advertising, or any other status has no effect on whether a record is shown.
How to read a record
Read each record together with its labels: the recipient or entity, the reporting entity, the category, the program year, the date or covered period, the amount or value, the nature of payment (for general payments), the record count or identifier, any CMS dispute or change status, and the as-of date. The most reliable reading is the narrow one: the record states that CMS published this data, for this category and program year, involving this reporting entity and this recipient. Any broader conclusion requires context that IndustryPayments does not provide.