"Dollars For Docs" - Pharmaceutical Companies' Big Spending

Dollars for Docs now includes 3.4 million payments since 2009, totaling more than $4 billion, of which $2.5 billion was for research. For 2013 alone, there were 1.2 million payments valued at nearly $1.4 billion.
It's not possible to calculate the exact number of physicians represented, because drug companies haven't used unique identification numbers that cross company lines. But it's clear that the figure is in the hundreds of thousands.
Excluding research payments, the drugmaker Pfizer appeared to have interactions with the most health care professionals last year — about 142,600. AstraZeneca came in second with about 111,200. Johnson & Johnson and Forest Labs each had nearly 100,000. There are an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 active doctors in the United States.

Below are the approximate numbers of health professionals who received some payment from each company in 2013, excluding research. We based this on the number of unique names, cities and states per company.

Company	Doctors Paid
Pfizer	142,600
AstraZeneca	111,200
Forest	98,900
Johnson & Johnson	97,000
GlaxoSmithKline	85,100
AbbVie	82,900
Boehringer Ingelheim	82,900
Merck	81,300
Eli Lilly	79,000
Novartis	64,500
Amgen	50,500
Valeant	21,200
UCB	21,200
Cephalon*	14,600
EMD Serono	7,900
ViiV	3,400

Note: Dollars for Docs only includes data for Cephalon from the first six months of 2013.

Source: ProPublica's Dollars for Docs.

Larger companies (as measured by 2013 U.S. drug sales) did not always spend the most on promotional speakers. Some companies in Dollars for Docs do not break out speaking payments (they are not listed here). Johnson & Johnson and Amgen call their speaking categories "non-consulting."

Company U.S. Sales Company Spending on Speaker Fees

Note: Merck U.S. sales includes both Merck & Co. and Schering Plough.

Source: IMS Health and ProPublica's Dollars for Docs.

Info taken from a lengthy article here