Physician Payment Sunshine Act: Open Payments Technology Vendor Mired in Healthcare.Gov

Discussion Although CGI may have separate staff working on the Open Payments website, the recent glitches on Healthcare.gov should raise concerns for those Sunshine and transparency stakeholders eagerly awaiting the first publication of data in September 2014. There may be some hope for CGI because the Open Payments website certainly has distinct differences from Healthcare.gov. For example, Open Payments is not being used to purchase or look for health insurance and does not require the same type of interaction or assistance with certified navigators to find health insurance. However, there are also similarities between Healthcare.gov and Open Payments. Healthcare.gov is collecting certain geographic and demographic information from U.S. citizens to help find individuals health insurance. Similarly, Open Payments will be collecting registration information from physicians and teaching hospitals, including numerous data entry points including their license and NPI numbers, business addresses, specialties, and much more. Moreover, Open Payments will be collecting the dates of payments, natures of payment, location of payments, amounts, descriptions and numerous other data entries. All of this information will have to be aggregated and as noted above, physicians and hospitals will have the opportunity to dispute this data—making Open Payments job difficult, even though CMS is not actually part of the dispute process. More importantly, the final regulation...
Source: Policy and Medicine - Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Source Type: blogs