On Sept. 30 the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released the first round of Open Payments data on the CMS website. Open Payments is a program mandated under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACA requires public disclosure of all transfers of value of $10 or more provided by pharmaceutical and device manufacturers to physicians and teaching hospitals. Transfers of value that must be disclosed include: gifts; speaker fees; research grants; meals; travel and investments.
For the first round of open payments, CMS has posted data from Aug. to Dec. 2013. The data includes $3.5 billion in payments to more than 500,000 physicians and more than 1,300 teaching hospitals. Due to concerns with data accuracy, 40 percent of the payments in the database are not currently attributed to a physician or teaching hospital. Additionally, almost 200,000 records have not been published because of concerns from the pharmaceutical industry or because the records are currently being disputed. Physicians and teaching hospitals were given the opportunity to review their open payments records prior to the Sept 30 publication. However, CMS has indicated that only 26,000 of the over 500,000 physicians accessed their data for review. An additional 400 of the 1,300 teaching hospitals accessed their data for review.
The Open Payments website includes a number of features to allow easy review of the database by the public. The entire database can be downloaded in Excel. Additionally, the Data Explorer Tool allows for easier searching of the datasets. A Data Dictionary provides readers with a better understanding of the program and its methodology. CMS has indicated that fact sheets, improved dataset functionality, and Q&As will be posted to the website in the coming months.