Open Payments Database Adds 68,000 Records
A new update to the Open Payments database features 68,000 records, totaling $200M worth of payments.
- The saga of the Sunshine Acts Open Payments Database continues to evolve. The last big news came a few weeks ago when experts called for patience, in hopes that the program could overcome a bad start. At the top of the list of needed changes is filling in the data gaps.
When launched back in September, one of the biggest complaints was that the database was incomplete. Despite having 4.4 million payments to physicians and teaching hospitals representing $3.5 billion, there were significant gaps in the information available. There was also a large amount of “de-identified information – mainly records that were still being disputed – that hurt the original launch.
Last week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that it has added approximately 68,000 additional payment records, valued at $200 million. That brings the total numbers up to $3.7 billion in payments and transfers of value for up to 546,000 individual physicians and 1,360 teaching hospitals. This includes data that was collected between August 1 and December 31, 2013.
According to the CMS article announcing the update, adding data like this is something that will be an ongoing process and will occur at least once after each years initial publication.
“The refreshed data will include updates to data disputes and other data corrections made since the initial publication of this data documenting payments or transfers of value to physicians and teaching hospitals, and physician ownership and investment interests,” the article reads. “This financial data was submitted by applicable manufacturers and applicable group purchasing organizations (GPOs). The accuracy of all data included in this update has been attested to by the submitting applicable manufacturer or GPO.”
This information was not part of the original September 30, 2014 release for one of two reasons. The first is that the records were still under dispute at the end of the physician and teaching hospital review period. The second is that data submitted on the last day of the 2013 program (July, 7, 2014) was inadvertently excluded.
The data is now subject to the 45-day physician and teaching hospital review period before publication. This means some records will not be available in this update. This includes records resolved by a change to the identifying information of the reported physician or teaching hospital; records submitted to the Open Payment system for the first time at the end of the submission window for the 2013 program year; and modifications to records currently on display, made after October 31, 2014.
The new data also does not include any of the de-identified physician or teaching hospital information from the original release. However, it does include new de-identified data. The complete 2014 dataset will be released on June 31, 2014.
