Dive Brief:
- The Open Payments site will be offline on Sep. 5 for maintenance after a day down on Aug. 30. This is the second time in two months the site has been shut down. The first was in August when a physician alerted the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that payments attributed to him were incorrect.
- The site has been open to allow physicians to review and dispute reported payments before it is available to the public on Sept. 30. When the site was down, CMS reported finding payments that were "intermingled" among physicians with the same names. CMS reported that they fixed the system and the incorrect information was removed.
- This most recent challenge with the system has provided fuel for detractors. Upon hearing the news, the American Medical Association released a statement saying the site is "not ready for prime time." A recent AMA survey found that many physicians had difficulty registering for the site and 62% of those who could access the system found the data to be inaccurate.
Dive Insight:
The Open Payments site is still scheduled to go live on Sept. 30, though the data will clearly be incomplete. One-third will not be reported because of incorrect information and CMS recently announced that more will be withheld—pharmaceutical research grants paid to doctors through an intermediary. These payments have not been verified by physicians, so they will be left out of the data. CMS has not provided information regarding the size of the second set of data to be withheld.
CMS has also not provided information regarding the amount of data that has been reported, the nature and total amount of withheld data or how they will inform consumers when data is withheld. Physicians will have until Sept. 10 to verify data on the site.
According to CMS, its decision to remove records was made in an effort to protect the consumer. Records were removed when a physician's name, national ID number or medical license number did not match official data sources.
"There will be a new time frame for the resubmission of the corrected records and a different public display date. More information about this process and timing is forthcoming in the coming weeks," CMS said in a note to providers.