CMS reactivates Open Payments website registration

The CMS announced Thursday that its Open Payments website registration for doctors is back up. It had temporarily taken registration down last week.

The agency is scheduled to make data concerning medical device and pharmaceutical manufacturer payments to doctors available to the public Sept. 30. Currently, the website is intended to allow physicians to check payments data attributed to them and contest any perceived erroneous data.

But last week, Dr. David E. Mann of Kentucky found that payments data from a Dr. David E. Mann of Florida had been commingled with his own, leading him to write a blog post about it. That caused the CMS to temporarily suspend registration for the website so it could find any additional errors.

The Mann mashup was only the beginning of problems concerning the site. Doctors complained that the registration process was overly onerous, as the CMS has apparently reused a registration tool from HealthCare.gov despite the tool's apparent failure there. The agency since has reportedly scrapped the tool. The website also was apparently not user-friendly once registered, with error messages and counterintuitive methods for challenging payments data.

The agency has said the registration-and-dispute period will be adjusted by one day for each day the website was suspended. That means providers will now have an additional week to register and review this year's tranche of data, with a 15-day correction period following that. That would push the new registration deadline to Sept. 3. The agency has also said that the payments data should still be available Sept. 30.

A CMS spokesman said more details on the relaunch would be released Friday.

Follow Darius Tahir on Twitter: @dariustahir