• Aladine A Elsamadicy, Isaac G Freedman, Andrew B Koo, Benjamin C Reeves, John Havlik, Wyatt B David, Christopher S Hong, Luis Kolb, Maxwell Laurans, Charles C Matouk, and Michael DiLuna.
• Department of Neurosurgery, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut. Electronic address: aladine.elsamadicy@yale.edu.
• World Neurosurg. 2021 Jan 1; 145: e90-e99.

ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to characterize the payments made by medical industry to neurosurgeons from 2014 to 2018.MethodsA retrospective study was performed from January 1, 2014 to December 31, 2018 of the Open Payments Database. Collected data included the total number of industry payments, the aggregate value of industry payments, and the mean value of each industry payment made to neurosurgeons per year over the 5-year period.ResultsA total of 105,150 unique surgeons, with 13,668 (12.99%) unique neurosurgeons, were identified to have received an industry payment during 2014-2018. Neurosurgeons were the second highest industry-paid surgical specialty, with a total 421,151 industry payments made to neurosurgeons, totaling $477,451,070. The mean average paid amount per surgeon was $34,932 (±$936,942). The largest proportion of payments were related to food and beverage (75.5%), followed by travel and lodging (14.9%), consulting fees (3.5%), nonconsulting service fees (2.1%), and royalties or licensing (1.9%), totaling 90.4% of all industry payments to neurologic surgeons. Summed across the 5-year period, the largest paid source types were royalties and licensing (64.0%; $305,517,489), consulting fees (11.8%; $56,445,950), nonconsulting service fees (7.3%; $34,629,109), current or prospective investments (6.8%, $32,307,959), and travel and lodging (4.8%, $22,982,165).ConclusionsOur study shows that over the most recent 5-year period (2014-2018) of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Open Payments Database, there was a decreasing trend of the total number of payments, but an increasing trend of the total amount paid to neurosurgeons.Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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