Which kinds of doctors take the most industry money?
The public records list every payment from drug and device makers to doctors, and they list what kind of medicine each doctor practices, but those two things are kept in separate places. Put together, the question answers itself: which specialties draw the most from industry, and is it small meals spread across thousands of doctors or big fees and royalties to a handful?
Payments and specialty never sat together.
The records list every payment from a maker to a doctor, the amount, the company, and what it was for, a meal, travel, consulting, a speaking fee, a royalty. What they don't reliably carry is what kind of medicine the doctor practices, which lives in a separate place. To ask which specialties get what, someone first had to match each doctor across both, which is exactly why the specialty-level view never existed.
Put the payments and the specialties side by side and the breakdown is direct. You can total every payment up by specialty, split it by what it was for, and separate the broad pattern, meals to many doctors, from the concentrated one, royalties and consulting to a few, so the real shape of industry money in each specialty becomes visible instead of averaged away.
Questions you can finally ask.
Each is a question you simply ask and get an answer to, not a three-week analysis project.
Which specialties receive the most industry money?
Total payments up by specialty so the fields most exposed to industry money surface in rank order.
Is it meals or big fees?
Split each specialty's payments by what they were for, to separate broad, low-value meals from concentrated consulting, speaking, and royalty payments.
Which specialties get the most per doctor?
Divide by the number of doctors in each specialty to see where the money is concentrated rather than just plentiful.
Where do royalties dominate?
Pull out royalty and licensing payments by specialty to find the fields, often device-heavy, where a few doctors earn the most.
Which specialties get the most consulting and speaking fees?
Surface the fields where industry pays for expertise and promotion rather than just hospitality.
How concentrated is the money within a specialty?
Measure how much of a specialty's total goes to its top earners, to see whether the money is broad or captured by a few.
What the answer pulls together.
Every industry payment
Each payment from a maker to a doctor, with the amount, the company, and what it was for, a meal, travel, consulting, a speaking fee, a royalty.
What each doctor practices
The official directory of doctors and their main specialty, the piece the payment records don't carry cleanly.
The shared identifier that links them
The unique ID each doctor carries in both places, the key that lets payments be grouped by specialty consistently.
One record tells you who got paid, and another tells you what they practice, but the payments never carried the specialty. So I put them side by side.
What people ask about this.
How are doctors matched across the two records?
By their unique ID rather than by name, which is what makes the specialty match reliable instead of fuzzy. A doctor with more than one listed specialty can be handled by their main one, and the tricky cases, group practices, mid-career switches, are visible rather than quietly merged. The match is keyed on the ID, so the specialty totals hold up.
Does a payment mean something improper?
No, and it shouldn't be read that way, this is a transparency record, not a finding of wrongdoing. Many payments are routine meals or legitimate consulting. What the specialty view adds is the pattern, which fields and which kinds of payment concentrate the money, so you can ask better questions, not assign blame.
How current is the answer?
It stays current on its own. When new information is published, it's already in there, so you're asking against today's picture, not a year-old extract.
Want this broken out
for your specialty?
Whether you're a researcher, a journalist, or a compliance team, I can get you the exact money-by-specialty answer you care about.