On May 1, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that starting in June, physicians and teaching hospitals can begin registering with the online Open Payments/Sunshine system. Registration for physicians and teaching hospitals will have two phases.
Phase 1 of registration will begin on June 1 and allows physicians to register with the CMS Enterprise Portal, which is an overall CMS system used to access a number of difference databases, systems and applications related to Medicare, Prescription Drugs and more programs.
Phase 2 of registration will begin sometime July, and physicians and teaching hospitals will be allowed to register with the specific Open Payments system. This will allow physicians to review the data being reported about them by biopharmaceutical and medical technology companies. If they feel the data is inaccurate, they can dispute it. However, if data is disputed but not resolved, it will be made public when the online database goes live in September with a note that it is disputed.
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Why is it important that physicians register with the online Open Payments/Sunshine system? If physicians don’t register, they won’t be able to review data reported about them before it becomes available to the public.
For more details, check out CMS’ Open Payments page for physicians.
