How to Use Open Payments Data in Peer-to-Peer Healthcare Education
In the world of healthcare, data is power—especially when it comes to understanding how physicians engage with industry. One valuable, publicly available data source that peer-to-peer education companies can tap into is Open Payments data, maintained by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). This federal transparency initiative captures detailed records of financial relationships between healthcare providers and pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device companies.
Open Payments includes categories like consulting fees, travel, research funding, royalties, speaker honoraria, and more. Manufacturers and group purchasing organizations (GPOs) are required to report payments made to physicians and teaching hospitals. The goal is to increase transparency around industry-provider relationships, and CMS makes this data publicly searchable each year. For a full breakdown, see the official Open Payments data overview.
Why Open Payments Is Powerful for Peer-to-Peer Education
Peer-to-peer (P2P) healthcare education depends on finding the right messengers—trusted healthcare professionals (HCPs) who can effectively educate their peers on new treatments, technologies, or best practices. Open Payments data helps you identify physicians who already have a history of industry engagement, whether through speaking, research, or participation in educational programs. In other words, it gives you a data-driven head start on finding credible, experienced voices.
Understanding Open Payments Categories: Speaker Programs, Research, Education & More
The Open Payments database is not a single list of transactions; it’s organized into detailed categories that can be extremely useful for peer-to-peer strategy. For example:
- Speaker Programs: Payments made to physicians for speaking at promotional or educational events
- Research Payments: Funding provided to support clinical trials or investigator-led research
- Education, Travel, and Food & Beverage: Payments related to attending industry-sponsored events or conferences
Identifying HCPs who have received speaker honoraria indicates experience in peer-to-peer education. Likewise, spotting those involved in research programs shows a deeper engagement with innovation. On the flip side, identifying providers who have received education-related or hospitality payments can help you map out who has already been exposed to specific messaging or product information.
Use Case: Targeting Physicians Based on Past Education Exposure
Let’s say you’re building a peer-to-peer program around a new diabetes drug. With Open Payments data, you can filter for physicians who have attended previous events about diabetes therapies, sponsored by your company or even by competitors. Knowing who’s been part of an education program helps you tailor your messaging more precisely — you can reinforce existing awareness, build on what they’ve already heard, or fill in gaps in understanding.
You can even pinpoint the date and topic of past events and see which HCPs were involved, giving you insight into how recently they were exposed to certain products or companies. This is a goldmine for segmenting your outreach lists.
Inverse Use Case: Discover Early Adopters of Innovative Products
Here’s another strategy: What if you built a list of HCPs who were early adopters or early educators for an innovative product? Take, for example, CAR-T cell therapy in oncology—a groundbreaking treatment area that saw rapid interest from KOLs and investigators in its early days. By scanning Open Payments data for research payments, speaker fees, or consulting engagements tied to CAR-T therapies in 2017–2018, you could identify:
- Physicians who were viewed as valuable by industry early on
- Potential KOLs for future educational programs
- Providers with long-standing engagement in cutting-edge science
This kind of reverse engineering can help you build KOL maps, spot regional influencers, and strengthen your targeting for high-science programs.
The Catch: Open Payments Data Is Public… But Hard to Use
While Open Payments is rich with insights, it’s notoriously difficult to work with in its raw form. The dataset is huge, fragmented, and not user-friendly unless you’re a seasoned data analyst. To pull meaningful insights like, “Which providers in Texas received over $1 million in orthopedic research payments since 2021?” — you’d need to clean, filter, and cross-reference several files.
That’s where Alpha Sophia changes the game. The Alpha Sophia platform simplifies Open Payments analytics by letting you:
- Search for providers by payment type, company, specialty, or geography
- Identify trends in payment activity over time
- Filter by amount (e.g., >$100K in research, >$5K in speaking fees)
- Export clean, ready-to-use lists of high-value providers
- See each provider’s payment history, clinical activity, and educational involvement
You can even search by product and instantly see which HCPs have been paid in relation to it—a powerful shortcut for understanding exposure and alignment.
Where the Real Power Lies: Combine Payment Data with Clinical Insight
What truly sets Alpha Sophia apart is its ability to merge Open Payments data with clinical biographies. You can layer in:
- Where a provider trained or did residency
- Which procedures they perform (via claims data)
- Where they currently practice (by site-of-care)
- Their billing volume and specialties
Imagine identifying a cardiologist in Chicago who received a $25,000 speaking honorarium from a major device company, performs 100+ stent procedures per year, and trained at a top-tier academic center. That’s not just a name on a spreadsheet—that’s a prime candidate for your peer-to-peer strategy.
Whether you’re building a speaker bureau, an advisory board, or an educational webinar series, combining financial relationship data with clinical behavior is the magic formula. Alpha Sophia makes it simple, fast, and actionable.
