When the government publishes information on the financial relationships between physicians, teaching hospitals, and the pharmaceutical and device industries on Sept. 30 as part of the Open Payments Program, about one-third of the available payment data will be missing.
Officials at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently confirmed that they are returning about one-third of the payment records already submitted by manufacturers and group purchasing organizations (GPOs) because of problems of "intermingled data." Those records will be included in the next public data release, scheduled for June 2015. The CMS did not provide information on the exact number of records that were being sent back for corrections.
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Dr. Robert Wah, president of the
Delaying the release of these records will allow manufacturers and GPOs to make corrections and give physicians and teaching hospitals time to review and dispute the data, according to the CMS.
But the American Medical Association said that doubts about the accuracy of one-third of the data being reported to the Open Payments system is a clear sign that more time is needed to revamp the program.
"The publication of inaccurate data can potentially harm the physician-patient relationship, which is why the AMA maintains its call for a 6-month delay of the data release," Dr. Robert M. Wah, AMA president, said in a statement.
The AMA, along with about 100 other state medical and specialty societies, has been on CMS officials to delay the start of the program, not only because of data accuracy issues, but because the registration and review processes have been confusing and time consuming.
The Open Payments program, which was mandated under the Affordable Care Act, has had a rocky rollout so far. The CMS was forced to delay the period for teaching hospitals and physicians to review and dispute payments after receiving reports that payment data were being attributed to the wrong physicians. The agency took the system offline for almost 2 weeks in early August to investigate the problems and implement fixes.
The CMS extended the deadline for physician and teaching hospitals to review and dispute data from Aug. 27 to Sept. 8, but is sticking to its plan to publish the first round of payment data on Sept. 30.
mschneider@frontlinemedcom.com
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