Physician Payments Sunshine Act: Open Payments System Back Up After 11 Days Offline
August 14, 2014: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have fixed the technical problems that caused Open Payments to be offline since August 3, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The dispute and resolution period for physicians and teaching hospitals to monitor their industry payments was put on hold after at least one doctor logged into the system and noticed that their information was switched with another doctor with the same name.
Yesterday afternoon, CMS released a statement that the hiatus was over: “The Open Payments system is once again available for physicians and teaching hospitals to register, review and dispute financial interaction information received from health care manufacturers and Group Purchasing Organizations.” (Wall Street Journal)
Initially, the review and dispute period was scheduled to run from July 14 through August 27, followed by a 15-day correction period. Last week CMS stated that “[f]or each day the Open Payments system is offline for this incident, CMS will adjust the Open Payments review and dispute deadline and the following 15-day corrections period deadline accordingly.”
Open Payments was offline for approximately 11 days, which would put the dispute period extension to Monday, September 7th.
CMS plans to provide additional details about the program “by tomorrow.” We will report the official timeframe as we hear more.
David Pittman of Politico Pro reported earlier this week that “CMS and drugmakers are blaming each other for the latest derailed launch of a high-profile health care website.”
“CMS traces the most recent problems to one or more drug manufacturers that submitted data incorrectly linking some doctors with information listed for similarly named physicians in other states,” the article states. “That mistake allowed both groups to see all the data instead of just their own individual numbers.”
“CMS takes physician privacy very seriously, and we have taken the system offline temporarily and will work with the industry to eliminate incorrect payment records,” the agency said in a statement after the system went down last week.
CGI Federal has been handling the technical aspects of Open Payments, but says that the agency, not the contractor, built the registration system that has caused problems with the physician portal. “We continue to work with CMS to resolve an issue that has affected a very small number of physician payment records, and expect CMS to bring the system back online shortly,” the company said in a statement this week. (Politico Pro)
Is Open Payments Repeating Healthcare.gov Problems?
It is tough not to link the Open Payments delays with the highly publicized healthcare.gov delays. Inside Health Policy interviewed a consultant who notes that while “Open Payments system isn’t nearly as high profile as the other website,” after the healthcare.gov rollout, “the agency should have made sure there were no glitches for this site. CGI Group, Inc., was originally the contractor responsible for healthcare.gov, and is now the contractor for the Open Payments website.”
The stakes that CMS is running up against now is how to insure that payment data is correct. The dispute resolution process provided some physician oversight over the accuracy their data, and hopefully there will be enough time for physicians to work through the system without any issues.
The delays have only been part of the issue for physicians. Physician registration is extremely time-consuming, and the usability of the website itself has been problematic. Modern Healthcare reports that “Dr. Nate Selden, president-elect of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, called the registration process ‘virtually impossible.'” Another physician, Dr. John Ratliff, agreed with Selden. “I think they say it takes 15 minutes. It probably took me two or three hours by the time I got through the entire process,” he told Modern Healthcare.
Modern Healthcare also notes that Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), while disappointed in the problematic roll-out, agreed with CMS that there should be adequate time for providers to review and correct information included in the database.
“I’ll take CMS at its word that this is a minor problem and that no delay in launching the program is necessary,” he said in a written statement. “Covered entities and providers should continue to work with CMS to make sure the program operates as intended. This is valuable information that should be available to the public.”
We will continue to follow the status of Open Payments as we inch closer to the public data release September 30th.