A month ago I wrote about how to scrape data from Pfizer’s doctor payments records. Pfizer lost a $2.3 billion lawsuit that alleged it had illegally marketed four of its drugs “with the intent to defraud or mislead” by promoting them for non-approved uses. Pfizer is one of eight drug companies that have begun publicly publishing this data.
So why scrape if it’s already public?
The website Pfizer setup allows only the most superficial examination. Sure, you can look up doctor’s by alphabetical order and see how much and why they were paid. But what if you wanted to know who Pfizer paid the most and why? The data is not downloadable or easily aggregated for further analysis.
Here are zip files of Pfizer’s data scraped from this website. 2009 and 2011 are partial because Pfizer only had these partial records at the time. 2010 is complete.
Download them. Play with them. Show me what you come up with