Medicare Prescriber Rankings
Top Medicare Part D prescribers ranked by total drug cost and opioid prescribing rate. Data from CMS Provider Utilization and Payment Data. According to the CMS Medicare Part D Prescriber data and the National Provider Identifier Registry, covering 2023 prescribing for more than 1 million U.S. clinicians since the benefit began in January 2006, you can search and compare here, every figure traces to its source in our methodology.
How to read these rankings. The lists below show the prescribers with the highest dollar volume of Medicare Part D drug claims and the highest share of opioid claims. High dollar volume often reflects specialization in expensive therapies (oncology biologics, rheumatology infusions, hepatitis-C antivirals) rather than over-prescribing. Likewise, a high opioid rate may reflect a pain-management or palliative-care practice. CMS publishes this data so the public can examine prescribing patterns; PlainDoctor surfaces it without judgment. See the full methodology for context on the underlying CMS Part D Public Use File.
Top 8 prescribers by Medicare Part D drug cost
Total 2023 Part D drug cost per prescriber, in millions. High totals usually reflect costly specialty therapies, not over-prescribing.
Top 100 Prescribers by Medicare Drug Cost
Providers with the highest total Medicare Part D drug costs. High costs often reflect specialty medications (oncology, rheumatology) rather than inappropriate prescribing.
Top 100 Opioid Prescribers by Rate
Providers with the highest opioid prescribing rates (percentage of total claims that are opioids). A minimum of 10 opioid claims is required to rank, so a single high-opioid month cannot top the list, but near that floor a rate stays volatile, and a high rate routinely reflects pain-management, palliative, or hospice practice rather than over-prescribing. For context, the national average opioid prescriber rate is 6.4%.
Prescriber Rankings by State
Top States by Prescriber Volume
Direct links to the most-populous state prescriber rankings: California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Washington, Massachusetts. See also top specialties and top states by overall provider count.
About This Data
Prescriber data comes from CMS Medicare Provider Utilization and Payment Data (Part D Prescriber data). It includes all Medicare-enrolled providers who prescribed at least 11 claims in the reporting period.
Important context: High drug costs often reflect the use of specialty medications (e.g., oncology drugs, biologics) and do not necessarily indicate wasteful prescribing. Similarly, high opioid rates may reflect legitimate pain management practices. These rankings provide transparency, not judgment.
Understanding Medicare prescribing data
The CMS Medicare Part D Prescriber Public Use File is one of the most detailed windows into physician practice patterns available to the public. Published annually, it covers prescription drug claims submitted by individual providers for Medicare Part D beneficiaries, the roughly 50 million Americans enrolled in the prescription drug benefit program. Because nearly all older Americans are in this program, the file provides a near-census of prescribing behavior for the most clinically active segment of the population.
Dollar cost rankings are heavily skewed by specialty. Oncologists and hematologists appear near the top of cost rankings almost every year because cancer biologics, drugs like trastuzumab, pembrolizumab, and rituximab, cost tens of thousands of dollars per course of treatment and Medicare covers them under Part B (physician-administered) as well as Part D (outpatient pharmacy). Rheumatologists appear for similar reasons: disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) for conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis carry high list prices. Neurologists prescribing multiple sclerosis therapies round out the high-cost tier. None of these specialties are over-prescribing in any clinical sense; they are simply treating conditions where the standard of care involves high-cost drugs.
Opioid prescribing rates are more nuanced. Pain management specialists and palliative care physicians legitimately maintain high opioid claim rates because their patient population requires it. Primary care physicians in rural areas with no access to pain specialists may also show elevated rates simply because they are the only option for chronic pain patients. The metric becomes concerning only when a high rate appears in a specialty where opioid use is not the standard of care, a pattern that state medical boards and the DEA investigate through their own administrative processes.
CMS began publishing this data in 2014 as part of a transparency initiative that followed investigative reporting about Medicare fraud and opioid over-prescription. The file is used by academic researchers, policy analysts, journalists, and healthcare systems for competitive benchmarking. PlainDoctor makes the data accessible to individual providers who want to see their own statistics, to patients who want to understand prescribing patterns, and to journalists and researchers who use it for accountability reporting.
One important limitation: the data has an approximately 18-month lag from the calendar year it covers to the date CMS publishes the file. The rankings on this page are based on the most recent CMS release. More recent prescribing behavior is visible to CMS for Medicare oversight purposes but is not yet in the public file. For provider-level data through more current periods, the CMS Provider Data Catalog and individual state prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) maintain more-current records, though those sources are not publicly downloadable in bulk form.
Methodology
Rankings on this hub are drawn from the CMS Medicare Part D Prescriber Public Use File (calendar year 2023), joined to provider records in the CMS National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES) by NPI. Every dollar figure, claim count, and opioid rate is the CMS-published value, not a PlainDoctor re-calculation. CMS suppresses any prescriber-drug-beneficiary combination with fewer than 11 beneficiaries for privacy, so low-volume prescribers may be partially or fully omitted.
Part D data covers only Medicare Part D prescriptions; commercial insurance, Medicaid, VA, TriCare, and cash-pay are excluded. Opioid rate is claims-weighted, which means a pain specialist with low overall volume can show a high rate without any deviation from CDC prescribing guidelines. These tables are a data-transparency resource, not a quality ranking. See the full methodology for sourcing, pipeline, and known limitations.
Reading these rankings responsibly
A top-100 position here measures federal billing volume, never quality.
- Looking up your own prescriber? Open their full profile for specialty context, MIPS scores, and the per-drug breakdown behind the headline number. Find a provider
- High totals usually track specialty and patient volume, compare a prescriber against their specialty peers before drawing conclusions. Compare providers
- State patterns differ sharply; the per-state prescriber tables show how your state ranks. State tables below
CMS suppresses combinations under 11 beneficiaries, and the public file lags ~18 months. These are transparency tables, not quality ratings.
Disclaimer: Data from CMS NPPES and Medicare Part D. PlainDoctor does not rate or rank providers. Provider information is self-reported and may not be current. Always verify information directly with the provider. About · Methodology