Good day, Sunshine

Open payments is open for business. How has your experience been so far?

The Open Payments program is part of the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, which is designed to lend transparency to the relationships between physicians and industry. The act requires manufacturers of pharmaceuticals, devices and biologics to disclose gifts and financial transactions with physicians and teaching hospitals.

Early rollout of the program revealed problems. Unlike the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) release of Medicare payments to physicians, this effort allowed physicians to review submitted data for accuracy. But the process for registering was onerous and flawed.

One electrophysiologist shared in a blog post the struggles of dealing with a recalcitrant website and many steps of authentication that eventually took him to his data. Well, his name, but data for another doctor with the same first and last name with a different middle initial, a different specialty and in a different state. Rut-ro, as they say.

In early August, CMS shut down the website in an attempt to fix the accuracy issue, and repeated the shutdown again at the end of August and again in early September. The American Medical Association argued to have the launch date delayed by six months to work out bugs before the data went public. Industry groups also lobbied for a delay. The agency extended the date for allowing physicians and teaching hospitals to review their data but stuck to its guns on the Sept. 30 launch data.

The release of Medicare data created a stir, in part because CMS provided little context to help the public understand what they saw. CMS said it was trying to educate the public about the cost of healthcare and help patients make informed, cost-conscious decisions about care. The move seemed more about public relations than public revelations, though.

CMS revamped the Open Payments website for the launch in what appears to be an effort to make it more user friendly for the public. Whether that redesign and functionality extends to the portals for physicians and industry is another thing.

How is the latest raising of the curtain working? Do the portals for physicians and industry now work, and are entries accurate? Have patients explored this latest resource and, if so, do they understand what they see? Is it affecting your practice? We will be tracking the rollout, so please let us know.

Candace Stuart

Editor, Cardiovascular Business

Candace Stuart, Contributor

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