Dollars for Docs, ProPublica's free, online lookup tool, compiles data on nearly $12 billion dollars in medical industry payments made to more than 1 million physicians in the United States between August 2013 and December 2018. Our unique crosswalk, which matches providers Open Payment IDs to their National Provider Identifier (NPI) number, enables our premium Dollars for Docs dataset to be used in conjunction with other provider-specific date sets that use NPI numbers. ProPublica matched approximately 99% of physicians to their NPI number.

We matched information from the Open Payments physician table to the National Plan & Provider Enumeration System (NPPES) to associate a National Provider Identifier to each physician's record in the Open Payments data. To increase the chances of a successful match, we performed this match against four versions of the NPPES database: March 11, 2018; September 11, 2016; July 12, 2015; and April 11, 2011. For records where a clear match was not found, we researched these records and manually selected the match where possible. We did not guess in any circumstance. More details are available in the documentation included as a sample download on this page.

Last updated October 3, 2019. To request student or journalist discount pricing for the crosswalk, contact us.