Physician Payments Sunshine Act: Open Payments 2015 Timeline; Enhancements to the System

Unlike the first Open Payments program year, which took place over a 5 month period from August 2013 – December 2013, the second year covers all of industries' 2014 payments or transfers of value to covered recipients. Data collection wrapped up on December 31, 2014. Following a month-long outage to Open Payments this January in order for CMS to address some technical issues, companies are expected to be able to submit their 2014 payment data during the months of February and March. The review and dispute process will follow, likely in April-May. Physicians and teaching hospitals will have at least 45 days to access the system and examine their reports. While usability on the data side of the Open Payments has seen improvement, it will be interesting to see whether the physician registration process has been smoothed out. Last year the complicated registration led to some physicians giving up mid-way. CMS addresses this aspect some in their Open Payments System Enhancements (addressed below). For first time users of Open Payments, registration is a two-step process—users must register first in CMS’s Enterprise Identity Management (EIDM) and then request access to the Open Payments system. The EIDM system is used as an identity verification process and may take some time to work through. Also note that EIDM will lock a user account after 60+ days of inactivity and will deactivate a user account after 180+ days. Applicable manufacturers and GPOs will complete re-certifica...
Source: Policy and Medicine - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs