Devices & Diagnostics, Hospitals, Pharma, Policy

Open Payments didn’t include over $1B in first roll out

It tuns out that the data  recently released from Open Payments wasn’t the full scope, according to ProPublica, […]

It tuns out that the data  recently released from Open Payments wasn’t the full scope, according to ProPublica, citing a fact sheet from CMS that indicated the payments were missing more than $1.1 billion between August and December 2013.

Last week, the long-anticipated Open Payments project showed 4.4 million payments worth about $3.5 billion.

From ProPublica’s Charles Ornstein:

The federal government’s new database of drug and device industry payments to doctors is even more incomplete than has been reported previously.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency overseeing the database, had said last week that it was not publishing any details on 9,000 payments that had been disputed by doctors or hospitals because those disputes hadn’t been resolved. It also said it would withhold data on 190,000 research payments related to drugs and devices that are not yet on the market, as is mandated by law.

Critics of Open Payments, among them the AMA, have complained that incomplete, out-of-context data will do more to confuse than inform the consumer. The stated goal of Open Payments is transparency, which has been praised in some circles but opened up last week to  thoroughly mixed reviews.

“The government withheld the names of doctors and hospitals associated with 40 percent of published payments and promised to disclose this information next year once it has been corrected and verified,” Ornstein notes.

The Wall Street Journal also reported that physicians and pharmaceutical companies have been critical over the fact that the CMS will not immediately correct any errors in the database; instead, CMS plans to make any corrections next year.

 

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