Nieman Foundation at Harvard
ProPublica will launch Prescriber Checkup on Saturday, a database that, as if guided by an occult hand, allows users to search which doctors are prescribing what drugs through Medicare. This comes on the heels of yesterday’s launch of the Nonprofit Explorer, a database that makes tax return information from nearly 616,000 nonprofit organizations searchable.
In 2010 alone, doctors wrote over one billion prescriptions to Medicare patients. Further exploration of the rapidly expanding Medicare drug system will dovetail nicely with ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs project, which tracks how much private doctors earn from pharmaceutical companies.
