CMS Site Downtime Leads To Revised Deadlines

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

The Open Payments site is scheduled for more downtime as complaints continue to roll in.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) scheduled outages to its Open Payments website to perform “scheduled maintenance upgrades” between August 30 and September 5. As a result, it has extended for review and dispute and correction to:

• Review and dispute (45 days): 7/14/2014 – 8/3/2014, 8/14/2014 – 9/10/2014
• Correction period (15 days): 9/11/2014 – 9/25/2014

The Open Payments system was created to promote greater transparency around the financial relationships of manufacturers, physicians, and teaching hospitals and requires applicable manufacturers and group purchasing organizations (GPOs) of covered drugs, devices, biologicals, and medical supplies to report payments or other transfers of value they make to physicians, physician owners or investors, and teaching hospitals to CMS.

Earlier technical issues prompted an 11-day shut-down of the Open Payments system in August when physicians found inaccurate data as they reviewed the system. First reported by ProPublica, a Dr. David E. Mann of Kentucky found that his data had been commingled with data from Dr. David E. Mann of Florida. CMS has indicated that about one-third of the data is “intermingled” among doctors and will not be released when the site is made public in September.

CMS released a statement that it had resolved the technical issue. At the time, CMS said that all data in the system was revalidated to ensure that the physician identifiers used by the applicable manufacturer or GPO are accurate. Additionally, all payment records were confirmed to be attributed to a single physician.

The latest delay comes after the trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America questioned the agency's transparency in rejecting data submissions from manufacturers for the site. The CMS, concerned with the possibility of intermingling, that is, matching payments data with the wrong doctor, has reportedly sent back about one-third of records for manufacturer correction.

The CMS sent out a pair of e-mails on August 28 clarifying the standards it applies to data submissions from manufacturers. In essence, submissions must match CMS' records of the national provider identification number, state license information, and first and last name exactly.

But in a statement, Jennifer Wall, PhRMA's senior communications director, said, “Our companies continue to review the data issues surrounding the recent actions by CMS to remove certain information from Open Payments. To date, they still do not have a full accounting of the rationale behind CMS' decision and therefore, it is difficult for us to fully understand the ongoing data validation issues.”

The website's problems have prompted criticism from other organizations as well. The American Medical Association has called for the registration-and-review process to extend until March 31, 2015.

The CMS this month had acknowledged that, because of suspected data inaccuracies, it will withhold about one-third of submitted records on drug and device-industry payments to physicians and teaching hospitals until June. The database is required by the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, a provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.