UPDATED: CMS announced on Thursday that its Open Payments website registration is back online. According to the agency, the registration and dispute period will be extended by one day for each day the website was suspended, making the new registration deadline September 3. Payments data will be made public September 30.
Dive Brief:
- The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) was forced to temporarily take down its Open Payments verification system late July 3 after ProPublica brought a technical glitch to the agency's attention.
- Dr. David E. Mann of Louisville, KY was able to see another doctor's drug and medical device payment information in addition to his own after logging into the system. The other physician had the same name as Dr. Mann but was licensed in a different state.
- As mandated by the Affordable Care Act's Physician Payment Sunshine Act, information about pharmaceutical and device manufacturers' payments to doctors—submitted through the Open Payments system—will be made public later this year.
Dive Insight:
CMS officials say the glitch occurred when a pharmaceutical company submitted the incorrect state medical license along with the physician's name and national provider identification (NPI) number to the system.
"After an assessment of the data resulting from a complaint, we discovered that a limited number of physician payment records submitted by at least one manufacturer incorrectly contained information about other physicians," wrote a CMS spokesperson in an email to ProPublica. "To protect physician privacy and correct the issue, we have taken the system offline temporarily and will work with the industry to eliminate incorrect payment records."
The glitch is the exact sort of technical failure in the Open Payments system that pharmaceutical companies and doctors have raised concerns about. Industry officials have complained that not enough doctors know that they can verify payments attributed to them under the system. Physicians have 45 days to dispute a payment record after it is entered into the database.