Open Payments, by the numbers.
What the CMS Open Payments (Sunshine Act) program disclosed for Program Year 2024 — every figure cited to its source. Last reviewed 2026-07-11; refreshed annually when CMS publishes the new program year.
Program Year 2024, in four figures.
reported in publishable payments and ownership interests, Program Year 2024 [1]
individual payment records published [1]
physicians received at least one reported payment [1]
non-physician practitioners received reported payments [1]
CMS also reported payments to 1,288 teaching hospitals in Program Year 2024.[1] Payments fall into three published categories — general payments (consulting, speaking, meals, travel), research payments, and ownership or investment interests. We publish the category dollar split only after verifying it against the CMS summary tables at each annual refresh.
What Open Payments actually is.
Open Payments is the federal transparency program created by the Physician Payments Sunshine Act. Drug and medical device manufacturers (and group purchasing organizations) must report payments and transfers of value they make to physicians, non-physician practitioners, and teaching hospitals; CMS publishes the records annually, at payment level, for anyone to inspect.[2]
For a medical sales team, the signal is relationships: which providers already engage with industry — as speakers, consultants, advisors, investigators — and with which manufacturers, at what depth. That context changes both who you target and how you open the conversation.
Searchable in plain English.
Oystercatcher carries a five-year rolling window of payment-level Open Payments records, rolled up by manufacturer and payment nature with engagement flags — Active Speaker, Consultant, Principal Investigator, Ownership — on every provider profile. “Rheumatologists with heavy pharma speaker relationships” is a query, not an analysis project. See the feature or all six datasets.
Where every number comes from.
Headline totals: dollars, records, physician and non-physician practitioner recipient counts, plus 1,288 teaching hospitals.
The searchable public dataset itself — payment-level records by recipient, manufacturer, and payment nature.
Methodology: figures are taken from the cited CMS publication for the stated program year, not modeled or extrapolated by us. This page is maintained by Oystercatcher Research and re-verified annually after CMS publishes each new program year; the last-reviewed date above changes only when the figures have been re-checked against the sources. Statistics belong to their publishers — cite CMS, not us, as the origin of the underlying data.
Let the agents
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Want proof first? Read an example dossier — sample data, real mechanics.