It's no secret that thousands of Texas medical professionals are paid by drug companies to do everything from study new treatments to pitch their wares at conferences and conventions. And it's certainly not illegal. But it's more surprising that at least 114 of them are state employees paid with taxpayer dollars — some of them already making salaries that exceed $500,000. These doctors and researchers brought in a combined $3 million from pharmaceutical companies, including research grants, travel, consulting fees and other payments, between 2009 and early 2011, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of ProPublica data.
The information found in the table below was compiled by matching employees found in the Tribune's Government Payroll Database with recipients in ProPublica's Dollars for Docs data. Each row in the table below represents an individual payment to a state-employed medical professional or research grant to a medical institution. Some individuals will have multiple payments. Use the drop downs to filter the table by either state employer or drug company. Click on an amount to see more information about that transaction.
Disclaimer: The pharmaceutical payments listed below shouldn't be considered complete; ProPublica culled the records over a specific time period from the fraction of drug companies that list their payments either voluntarily or as the result of a court settlement.
Pharmaceutical payment data was provided by ProPublica. For more about its Dollars for Docs project, visit propublica.org/docdollars.
Texas employee data comes from the Texas Tribune's Government Employee Salary Database.
