How company payments to doctors are calculated

The pharmaceutical and medical device industries, even when required by the federal government, have not made it easy to track their expenditures on doctors and teaching hospitals. It has taken ProPublica several months to spot and fix errors in the Open Payments database, which the federal government released at the end of September. (The government released an updated version of the database in mid-December, but that is not included in this analysis.) Some companies misspelled the names of drugs and devices, which made it difficult to tally spending. Others referred to their products by more than one name. Some companies listed their medical devices as drugs, while other companies reported payments to doctors or teaching hospitals but left off which products were related to the payments.