Opportunity to review Open Payments data is approaching

The release in April of Medicare payments made to individual physicians caused its share of headaches and hand-wringing among practitioners who claimed that some of the information was incorrect or could be interpreted poorly by the public without the proper context.

Later this summer, another round of public filings could make life difficult. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will begin releasing data from pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers and group purchasing organizations on all financial interactions they've had with individual physicians and teaching hospitals.

Open Payments (you may remember it when it was called the Sunshine Act) is scheduled to release data for the final five months of 2013 by the end of September this year. Described as a way to provide more transparency to the financial relationships between physicians and their suppliers, the program tracks any payment or transfer of value of more than $10 from an applicable vendor to a physician. Beginning next year and thereafter, the Open Payments releases will cover an entire year.

Unlike the Medicare payments release, physicians will have a shot at reviewing the information submitted by manufacturers and attempting to correct any errors before publication.

Beginning June 1, eligible practitioners will be able to register for the CMS Enterprise Portal. This is considered the first step and must be completed before physicians, beginning in July, can register in the Open Payments system itself. That registration will gain the physician access to any manufacturer information reported about him or her, as well as allow the physician to dispute any payments he or she believes are inaccurate.

For more information on the Open Payments program, the CMS has a web site, complete with a downloadable user's guide.