The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will be hosting a call next Thursday, January 15, 2015 for an Open Payments Question & Answer Session. The session will begin at 11:30 AM EST.
CMS notes that stakeholders should bring their questions to this session related to the December 19 data refresh, or the upcoming 2014 Open Payments program year.
CMS provides the following log-in information:
Dial-in information: Note that there will be no online portion to this meeting; please just use this phone line for the audio meeting: 1-877-267-1577
Meeting number: 995 248 830 (a password is not required)
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As a reminder, CMS announced last month that Open Payments would be unavailable during the month of January as they work to “improve functionality and build on lessons learned, registration, data submission, and review and dispute functions” in the system.
Also, in December CMS added approximately 68,000 payment records—valued at more than $200 million—to the Open Payments dataset. With this new data, Open Payments now reports information on $3.7 billion in payments and transfers of value made to up to 546,000 individual physicians and up to 1,360 teaching hospitals in the last five months of the 2013 calendar year.
The approximately 68,000 records added to the Open Payments dataset were not published in the initial release on September 30 for one of the following reasons:
- The record was still under dispute at the end of the physician and teaching hospital review period (September 11, 2014); or,
- Records attested to on the last day of the data submission period for the 2013 program year (July 7, 2014) were inadvertently excluded from publication (however, they were still included in the full 45-day review and dispute process).
CMS will publish the full calendar year of 2014 financial data by June 30, 2015. In addition, CMS plans to include and publish the missing identification of the de-identified data from 2013 by this date (June 30, 2015).
CMS notes that every year they will update the Open Payments data at least once after its 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.