August 7, 2014; 3:58 PM: “The Open Payments system has been taken offline temporarily to investigate a reported issue,” says the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Thus, physicians, teaching hospitals and authorized representatives may not register and review data at this time.
CMS states 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.”
We are concerned that continued delays in the system will result in less and less physicians waiting around to review their data within the system. The process has proven to be challenging enough without the delays. Physicians may not be willing to keep checking back with CMS to see if they can see their data.
Thus, we hope that this offline period is compensated with significant extra time to allow for outreach to physicians. News of the technical trouble with Open Payments arose almost a week ago, and yet this announcement today is the first we have heard from CMS making an official statement about the issue.
Even if CMS extends the dispute deadline by a few days, when will physicians and teaching hospitals learn about it?
According to CMS:
“We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and as soon as we have more information available, including when the Open Payments system is scheduled to go back online, you will be notified via email,” states CMS. “Please note that you may continue to proceed with registering in the CMS Enterprise Portal (the first phase in registering in the Open Payments system.)
Perhaps those organizations asking for restraint on publication until the bugs were worked out in the system weren’t wrong to begin with.