U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services federal government website
Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, 6 September 2023, "Open Payments Glossary", contributed by Lindsay Poirier, STS Infrastructures, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 21 February 2024, accessed 30 April 2024. https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/open-payments-glossary
Critical Commentary
Enacted via the U.S. Affordable Care Act, the Physician Payments Sunshine Act requires that pharmaceutical companies and medical device companies in the U.S. report "transfers of value" (or payments) they distribute to physicians on an annual basis. These payments are published in a public database, enabling patients to look up their doctors and determine how much they had been paid via manufacturuers. The original intention was to track conflicts of interest in prescribing in the U.S.
On this webpage, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (the federal agency that stewards this program) outlines the formal defintions for different concepts in the data. These definitions are used to determine who is required to report to the program and which activities they are required to report on. Here I direct attention to the formal definition for "Applicable Manufacturers" - the industrial entities that are required to report to Open Payments.