The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) yesterday published 2014 Open Payments data enumerating payments, honoraria or research grants from drug and device manufacturers to health care providers. The data includes information about 11.4 million financial transactions attributed to over 600,000 physicians and more than 1,100 teaching hospitals, totaling $6.49 billion.
The program relies on voluntary participation by physicians and teaching hospitals to review the information submitted by various drug and medical device manufacturing companies. CMS will update the Open Payments data at least annually to include updates to data disputes and other data corrections made since the initial publication. The financial data available through Open Payments was submitted by applicable drug and device manufacturers and applicable group purchasing organizations (GPOs). The accuracy of all data included in Open Payments reporting is attested to by the submitting manufacturer or GPO.
For all 2014 and 2013 data, CMS was able to validate that 98.8 percent of all records submitted in the Open Payments system contained accurate identifying information about the associated covered recipient. Records that could not be verified to align to an individual covered recipient were rejected and were not processed by the system. CMS will continue to update the Open Payments website annually with data collected from the previous year.
Prior to publication of any Open Payments data, physicians and teaching hospitals are given the opportunity to register with the Open Payments system to review and dispute data submitted about them by applicable manufacturers and applicable GPOs. With this data release, both the 2014 and 2013 financial records are now available as part of the Open Payments dataset.
CMS will refresh and publish an update to the full calendar year of 2014 financial data in early 2016. Learn more about Open Payments.