USA: The more opioids doctors Rx, the more money they make....

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(CNN)
To examine the relationship between which doctors were writing prescriptions for opioids and which were receiving money and gifts from the opioid industry, CNN collaborated with a pair of top academic medical researchers: Dr. Michael Lawrence Barnett of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Dr. Anupam B. Jena of Harvard Medical School.

The source data

The CNN and Harvard team analyzed a series of government records to investigate the issue, primarily using two databases maintained by the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

One captures all prescription claims nationwide written under Medicare's Part D program (Medicare's prescription drug insurance program). The database includes tens of millions of records of the number of prescriptions written by any medical provider nationally, broken down by the specific medication prescribed. 
For this story, we used 2014 and 2015 data, the most recent available at the time.

The other database contains millions of records of payments (e.g. speaking fees, research funds) and gifts (e.g. travel, meals, etc.) made by pharmaceutical companies to doctors in the United States. Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal Open Payments program requires all drug and medical device companies to report such payments annually to the government, which then makes them available to the public online on a searchable website. CMS also makes the entire database available. For this story, we used 2014 and 2015 data, to match the Part D prescription data timeframe.

Additionally, several government databases were also used to help further identify and classify the drugs, manufacturers and doctors examined in the analysis. The US Food and Drug Administration's Orange Book includes all drug variations considered opioids by the FDA, as well as the companies that manufacture them. The CMS-maintained National Plan and Provider Enumeration System's National Provider Identifier database includes unique identifiers, known as NPI numbers, for all US physicians, as well as information such as location and practice specialties. (Más)

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