First Release of Open Payments Data Published by CMS.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has published Open Payments data for the first time, related to payments made by drug and medical device manufacturers and group purchasing organizations (GPOs) to physicians and teaching hospitals.  The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act requires annual posting of such data through the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, otherwise known as Open Payments.  This year’s initial data publication only constitutes payments from August 1, 2013 through December 31, 2013.  Starting on June 30, 2015, CMS will publish annual data.

CMS reported that several data errors occurred during this reporting period, with manufacturers and GPOs inadvertently intermingling the wrong state license number or national provider identifier for physicians with the same last and first names.  CMS withheld the erroneous data from publication.

The Open Payments data can be downloaded at:

http://cms.gov/OpenPayments/index.html.

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.  “Open Payments.”  30 Sept. 2014 <http://cms.gov/OpenPayments/index.html>.