Physician Payment Sunshine Act: Doctors Stuck in Open Payments Waiting Room

 

After a 12-day delay in the Dispute Resolution process, it seems like some doctors were anxious to get into Open Payments and review their data:

The American Medical Association (AMA) has been urging CMS to extend the dispute window and the publication of the database, given the problems with the website, which is being compared to the rollout of healthcare.gov (CBSNews).

The crowded website delays appear to be the latest on the long list of grievances, including:

• A requirement to create a registration profile on the CMS Enterprise Portal before registering for the Open Payments program, which takes several steps and involves the submission of detailed personal information;

• No clear guidance on where to go to register in the Open Payments system;

• An Open Payments registration process that takes at least 30 minutes and has taken some physicians over two hours;

• A requirement that the Open Payments registration process be completed in one sitting, with no data saved if a physician comes back to the process later; and

• A requirement that registrations can only be done using the Internet Explorer browser.

(AMA via Bloomberg)

Additionally, some physicians have completed their registrations, attempted to review their information and received error messages. Other Open Payments users have taken to Twitter to discuss their issues with the website:


The Open Payments Help Desk is reportedly telling physicians to get representatives because of the length of the process. Physicians, meanwhile, have expressed less and less confidence in the accuracy and merit of the Open Payments system as the process has unfolded.
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CMS extended the Open Payments review and dispute deadline and the following 15-day corrections period deadline for each day the Open Payments system was offline following matching problems with the doctor data. The dispute deadline now runs until September 8, the correction period will run through September 9-23, and the public website launch date is still scheduled to launch on September 30.

We looked into some potential reasons for the mix-up last week, and found that Open Payments’ reliance on the NPPES database seems like the culprit behind the rejected data. 

Health Industry Washington reports that CMS has enhanced its algorithms and validation checks in an effort to resolve the issues and removed incorrect payment transactions. In an effort to clean up the Open Payments system, CMS has reportedly removed one-third of the data. The withheld data will be published in July of next year.

Many stakeholders have questioned whether an incomplete database furthers the goal of transparency. We think this may actually contribute more to the misinterpretation of the physician payment data. 

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