Civics: using software and public data to evaluate influence

Paul Thacker:

RICH: Correct. My initial efforts were to make an interactive geospatial visualization where you could watch payments drop like raindrops over time and visually recognize patterns. For example, there’s this spike in food and beverage payments at the end of December every year and this coincides with payments for speaker’s fees happening all across the country.

So you start to understand that one doctor was likely speaking to all these other doctors who got dinners and drinks that day.

I want to make it easier to explore the financial relationships between authors of articles in medical journals and industry, mostly drug and device companies.