Access our data

Anonymised CSV Exports

Anonymised CSV exports of our data are available on our download page^[1]French data in the same format can be downloaded from eurosfordocs.fr, at this url. This data contains names and is much bigger.. For practicality, you can download the entire dataset, or a CSV per country and / or per year. This data contains everything, to the exceptions of the names, addresses and identifiers of Healthcare Practitioners.

Metabase

Metabase is an open-source data data exploration tool (see metabase.com), that we use to explore the data, and build charts and dashboards. You can access it here:

You can create an account directly by using the google Sign-in. If you don’t have a @gmail.com address or don’t want to use the google sign-in, just send us an email ([email protected]), and we will send you an invite.

In Metabase, you will by default only access the anonymised data. If you want to access the Healthcare Practitioners’s names, please contact us and let us know why you’re interested in this data. As stated in our privacy policy, when we give this data access on a personal level, the purpose of the project should be to investigate or report on the transparency in the health sector.

Why is data anonymised?

As stated in our privacy notice, all the data in our database is data that is already published elsewhere, and transparency constitutes a legitimate interest to process the names contained in the documents we extract it from. Even so, we took the decision to not publish the full data, to reduce the risks of legal actions against our project. In the past, similar project have faced legal actions, especially the “Euros für Ärtzte” project from CORRECTIV and der Spiegel, which was using the same source data as our project (voluntary industry disclosure documents from Germany, Switzerland and Austria). They were sued 135 times by doctors from publishing their personal data. It is important to note that none of these claims were successful, the juges always concluded to the legality of the project.^[2]https://correctiv.org/aktuelles/2021/01/14/euros-fuer-aerzte-datenbank-beendet/

Such legal actions represent a dramatic risk for us, not only financially, but also in terms of time that would be spent on handling such actions. This is why we don’t publish the data.

Full data access

Anybody asking for access to the full dataset (with names) must precise the purpose of their project. As long as this purpose fits in our privacy notice, we will give access. We list who has access to the data and the motives that they give us. This list is not published or shared with any third party.

We also want to draw attention on some limitations of the data. In auto-regulated countries, the data is incomplete on many levels, and it’s crucial to keep this in mind in any project using the data:

• Drug companies could have not disclosed everything, as they only signed a voluntary code of conduct, which is nowhere as binding as a law,
• Drug companies use the R&D category to disclose some amounts without giving any details on the recipients or on the nature of the payments, even if the payments has very little to do with R&D,
• In most countries, HCP have to give their consent for their names to appear in the disclosure documents,
• In countries where disclosures are published as individual PDFs, we were not able to parse all PDFs, so some data is simply missing. Click here to see these “gaps”,
• For Spain and Italy, we only tried to parse the PDFs form the top 20 companies, all the rest is missing.
• There is a lot of room left to interpretation in terms of categories, so the same kind of payments could be disclosed in different categories by different companies. Similarly, companies can disclose amount with or without VAT. They usually explain this in details in methodological notes on their websites.