Prescriber Peer Comparison Tool

How does a provider compare to their specialty peers? This tool lets you explore prescribing benchmarks for any Medicare Part D specialty — including average opioid rates, cost per beneficiary, brand prescribing percentage, and the percentile thresholds used to identify statistical outliers. No other public tool offers this level of specialty-adjusted context.

Why This Tool Exists

When evaluating a provider's prescribing patterns, raw numbers are misleading without specialty context. A pain management specialist with a 15% opioid rate might be well below their peers' average, while a dermatologist at 5% might be a major outlier. This tool provides the reference data needed to make meaningful comparisons.

OpenPrescriber calculates these benchmarks from the complete 2023 Medicare Part D dataset, encompassing over 1.1 million prescribers across 156+ specialties. For each specialty, we compute the mean, standard deviation, median, and key percentiles (P90, P95) for three critical metrics: opioid prescribing rate, cost per beneficiary, and brand-name prescribing percentage.

Who Uses This Data?

Patients use peer comparison to understand whether their doctor's prescribing patterns are typical or unusual. Journalists use it to contextualize stories about prescribing outliers. Researchers use it to study variation in clinical practice. Policymakers use it to identify specialties where targeted interventions could reduce costs or improve safety.

CMS uses similar specialty-adjusted methodologies internally for fraud detection and quality measurement. OpenPrescriber makes this approach publicly accessible for the first time, democratizing access to the analytical tools previously available only to government auditors and large health systems.

Limitations

Specialty benchmarks reflect averages across all providers in a specialty nationally. Regional variation, practice size, and patient population differences can all affect individual provider metrics. A provider who appears to be an outlier statistically may have legitimate clinical reasons for their prescribing patterns. This tool is intended for informational and educational purposes — not as a definitive assessment of provider quality or appropriateness.