CMS extends Sunshine Act records review deadline, tosses a third of reported data

Physicians and teaching hospitals now have until September 8, 2014, to review payment information manufacturers and group purchasing organizations have submitted to the government about them as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) had to take its online Open Payments verification system down for nearly two weeks to fix glitches and problems with the reported data.

After David E. Mann, MD, a Louisville, Kentucky, electrophysiologist, noticed that the system was attributing payments to him that had actually been made to a Florida doctor with the same name, he and the non-profit investigative journalism group ProPublica brought the issue to CMS. It in turn took the Open Payments system down for from August 3rd through the 15th to fix this and other glitches.

CMS said in its press release announcing the return of the system that it had implemented system fixes and revalidated all data. It also noted that incorrect payment transactions had been “removed from the current review and dispute process and this data will not be published.”

Tossing all possibly incorrect data may help CMS keep its original publication deadline for the public as September 30. However, for the legislators that originally proposed the Sunshine Act and groups like ProPublica that have sought insight into the ways industry payments may influence providers' prescribing and ordering practices, incomplete data is not useful.

In the press release, CMS did not quantify how much of the data would be removed, but ProPublica noted that in an email, CMS spokesman Aaron Albright said that the agency was returning about one-third of submitted records to the manufacturers and group purchasing organizations because of problems with physicians being linked to medical license numbers or national provider identification numbers that were not theirs.

The American Medical Association (AMA), for its part, is encouraging all of its physician members to report problems they encounter with the system as part of the AMA’s ongoing efforts to get the Federal government to either change the Sunshine Act law or fix the current system to be more fair to physicians. For example, if a physician cannot log in and contest erroneous information about him or her now, that wrong information will be up on CMS’s public website for a whole year.

The AMA is encouraging physicians to take a short advocacy survey about the Open Payments system by Fri., Aug. 22, 2014, and e-mail OpenPayments@ama-assn.org at any time with Open Payments anecdotes.