How the LA Daily News investigated financial ties between drug manufacturers and doctors who prescribed psychotropic medications to California foster children from July 2009 to July 2014

According to their report

The news organization analyzed financial ties between drug manufacturers and doctors who prescribed psychotropic medications to California foster children from July 2009 to July 2014.

The Prescribers: We started with a list of prescribers obtained through a public records request from the state Department of Health Care Services. The list identified prescribers’ names, addresses and whether they wrote more than or fewer than 75 prescriptions for psychotropic medications each fiscal year. The state did not provide data to show precisely how many prescriptions each individual wrote.

The Dollars: We matched the 1,647 prescribers with physicians in a database of drug company payments, compiled by the journalism public interest nonprofit ProPublica, called “Dollars for Docs” — http://projects.propublica.org/docdollars.

The organization has built the most comprehensive public database to date of drug company spending on doctors and health care institutions, with more than $4 billion in payments nationwide.

The Limitations:The news organization’s analysis doesn’t catalog all spending on prescribers because in the four years examined just 17 drug companies and not the entire industry revealed what they spent on doctors, many under corporate integrity agreements with the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The Analysis: Because of the limitations of the drug company reports, the news organization considered a four-year period of spending instead of a year-by-year analysis.

The Matching: There were some inconsistencies in the way drug companies reported doctors’ names. Sometimes doctors were listed as payees. Sometimes a related entity, such as a clinic, was listed as the payee with the doctor shown as affiliated with the entity.

The news organization aggregated totals for all payments to doctors and related entities under the doctor’s name. Part of the total may represent payment to others for the doctor’s services.