Have any of you ever wondered whether or not your doctor was actually being paid to or received gifts from the various pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers they prescribe to you?

Sometimes, doctors and hospitals have financial relationships with health care manufacturing companies. These relationships can include money for research activities, gifts, speaking fees, meals, or travel. The Social Security Act requires CMS to collect information from applicable manufacturers and group purchasing organizations (GPOs) in order to report information about their financial relationships with physicians and hospitals. Open Payments is the federally run program that collects the information about these financial relationships and makes it available to you.

This link below will help you find out whether or not this is happening and it's run by CMS which stands for Center for Medicare-Medicaid Services. Because of the new Sunshine Laws provision of the Affordable Care Act, this information must be available to the general public which is a very good tool t use in case one is leary regarding their doctors intentions when prescribing medicines and/or medical devices that seem questionable.

However, this is not an easy process so understand that you'll have to follow the instructions of the website and read all of the FAQ's in order to have a good understanding on how to navigate through all the databases and the variety of acronyms & definitions before you start to actually search through these databases for you own doctor's records. So please understand what I just described because if you do not learn how to navigate the web site, you will more than likely get frustrated and give up searching or at the very least kick yourself in the butt for not doing so. And here's the link for the homepage of this valuable tool.

http://www.cms.gov/openpayments/index.html

Hopefully, this may help someone.