Aug. 18, 2014 – The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced that it had reopened its Open Payments Website and would extend the period during which physicians can review and request corrections to their Physician Sunshine Act records, according to an Aug. 15 article in Policy and Medicine. The agency had taken its site offline after data integrity issues – mainly data matching errors between manufacturer submissions and physician state license numbers or national provider identifiers – were discovered, CMS stated. For more information, go to: http://www.policymed.com/2014/08/physician-payments-sunshine-act-cms-extends-dispute-window-to-september-8-data-will-go-live-september-30.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=FeedBlitzRss&utm_content=Physician+Payments+Sunshine+Act%3a+CMS+Extends+Dispute+Window+to+September+8%3b+Data+Will+Go+Live+September+30

Further, ProPublica reported the same day that when CMS reports the data collected on the Open Payments site to consumers Sept. 30 (this date was not changed by CMS even though the dispute period was extended), roughly one-third of the records will be held back because of data inconsistencies. ProPublica reports that CMS has stated that “incorrect payment transactions have been removed from the current review and dispute process and this data will not be published.” Additional coverage by ProPublica can be found at: http://www.propublica.org/article/government-will-withhold-one-third-of-the-records-from-database-of-physicia#