Quantifying industry spending on promotional events using Open Payments data: Event classification script

We conducted a cross-sectional study of the publicly available 2022 Open Payments data to characterize and quantify sponsored events (available for download at: https://www.cms.gov/priorities/key-initiatives/open-payments/data/dataset-downloads).

Data sources
We downloaded the 2022 dataset ZIP files from the Open Payments website on June 30th, 2023. We included all records for nurse practitioners, clinical nurse specialists, certified registered nurse anesthetists, and certified nurse-midwives (hereafter advanced practiced registered nurses (APRNs)); and allopathic and osteopathic physicians (hereafter, ‘physicians’). To ensure consistency in provider classification, we linked Payments data to the National Plan and Provider Enumeration System data (June 2023) by National Provider Identifier (NPI) and the National Uniform Claim Committee (NUCC) and excluded individuals with an ambiguous provider type.

Event-centric analysis of Open Payments records: Creating an event typology
We included only payments classified as “food and beverage” to reliably identify distinct sponsored events. We reasoned that food and beverage would be consumed on the same day in the same place, thus assumed that records for food and beverage associated with the same event would share the date of payment and location. We also assumed that the reported value of a food and beverage payment is the total cost of the hospitality divided by the number of attendees, thus grouped payment records with the same amount, rounded to the nearest dollar.

Inferring which Open Payment records relate to the same sponsored event requires analytic decisions regarding the selection and representation of variables that define an event. To understand the impact of these choices, we undertook a sensitivity analysis to explore alternative ways to group Open Payments records for food and beverage, to determine how combination of variables, including date (specific date or within the same calendar week), amount (rounded to nearest dollar), and recipient’s state, affected the identification of sponsored events in the Open Payments data set. We chose to define a sponsored event as a cluster of three or more individual payment records for food and beverage (nature of payment) with the following matching Open Payments record variables:
• Submitting applicable manufacturer (name)
• Product category or therapeutic area
• Name of drug or biological or device or medical supply
• Recipient state
• Total amount of payment (USD, rounded to nearest dollar)
• Date of payment (exact)
After examining the distribution of the data, we classified events in terms of size (≥20 attendees as “large” and 3-<20 as “small”) and amount per person. We categorized events <$10 as “coffee”, $10-<$30 as “lunch”, $30-<$150 as “dinner”, and ≥$150 as “banquet”.