The CMS Friday added about 68,000 new records documenting $200 million in payments made to physicians by medical-device and drug manufacturers to its Open Payments database.
The records track payments and transfers of value, such as meals, gifts and research grants, made in the final five months of 2013. They were not included in the initial launch of the database in September because the records was still under dispute as of Sept. 11, or because records submitted in July were “inadvertently excluded” from the publication of the database.
About 9,000 records were disputed during the review period, a CMS spokesman said in a statement. Those records are now included in the database.
The Open Payments database provides the public with information about financial relationships between industry and healthcare providers. The database is required by the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, a provision of the Affordable Care Act, which seeks to make such relationships transparent.
The database has now documented $3.7 billion in payments made to half a million doctors and 1,360 teaching hospitals. The next round of data, including all payments made in 2014, will be released in June. At that time, the CMS also will update some records from 2013 that have de-identified data.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), an author of the law, applauded the update to the database. “CMS continues to make the database more complete and more helpful for the public,” he said in a statement.
The level of detail in the records and the far-reaching ties between manufacturers and physicians and teaching hospitals highlight the complexity of the law. Earlier this week, the CMS announced in guidance that in 2016 it would start requiring the disclosure of some payments made by industry to physicians for continuing medical education activities.
Follow Jaimy Lee on Twitter: @MHjlee
