CMS To Withhold 1 Of 3 Records From Open Payments
By Katie Wike, contributing writer
Data inconsistencies are behind the CMS announcement that about one third of records will be withheld next month at the launch of Open Payments.
Next month, when the Open Payments system launches, about one third of the medical industry companies’ records will be withheld as a result of data discrepancies found among their records. Because of this “intermingled data,” these records will not be released until June 2015.
“CMS takes data integrity very seriously and took swift action after a physician reported a problem,” said CMS Deputy Administrator and Director of the Center for Program Integrity Shantanu Agrawal, M.D. in a press release. “We have identified the root cause of the problem and have instituted a system fix to prevent similar errors. We strongly encourage physicians to review their records before the deadline and before the data are posted publicly to identify any discrepancies.”
This data was discovered following a case where Open Payments confused two doctors of the same name and incorrectly assigned their payment information. “A full investigation into a physician complaint found that manufacturers and group purchasing organizations (GPOs) submitted intermingled data, such as the wrong state license number or national provider identifier (NPI), for physicians with the same last and first names. This erroneously linked physician data in the Open Payments system,” said CMS.
“CMS has implemented system fixes to resolve the issue, and revalidated all data in the system to verify that the physician identifiers used by the applicable manufacturer or GPO are accurate, and that all payment records are attributed to a single physician. Incorrect payment transactions have been removed from the current review and dispute process and this data will not be published.”
iHealth Beat reports that CMS did not disclose just how many records will be withheld, but says the number could be in the millions. Despite this setback, the public website will still be available September 30, 2014.