An Update on Post-Pandemic Financial Relationships Between Manufacturers and Practitioners

Earlier this year, we analyzed the Open Payments database to determine how the COVID-19 pandemic affected relationships between healthcare manufacturers and physicians through 2022. Our analysis found that while most common financial arrangements experienced an abrupt downtick due to the pandemic, payments from healthcare manufacturers have been trending back to pre-pandemic levels, but that certain types of payments may have leveled off below where they were in 2019.

At the end of June 2024, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) updated the Open Payments database to include payments reported for program year 2023 and retroactively update program years 2017 through 2022 with additional changes. Because the Department of Health and Human Services only declared the end of the public health emergency in May 2023, this publication is our first real insight into true “post-pandemic” trends.

We replicated our prior methodology to evaluate whether program year 2023 impacted our findings. Our analysis shows that the trends we highlighted in June generally remain true. Specifically, in 2023 both total speaking fees and total consulting fees remained essentially unchanged from 2022, and both appear to have stabilized below pre-pandemic levels.