Increasing Transparency in Health Care with Open Payments

By Ted Doolittle, Deputy Director, CMS Center for Program Integrity
At the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, we are committed to transparency. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, we have powerful new tools to advance transparency in health care and provide consumers with the information necessary to make informed choices. I’m pleased to share today the latest steps we are taking to bring accountability to health care under our national Open Payments program (commonly known as the Physician Payments Sunshine Act).
This program is designed to increase public awareness of financial relationships between drug and device manufacturers, group purchasing organizations (GPOs) and certain health care providers. Patients should know when their doctors have a financial relationship with health care facilities and companies that make or supply medicines or medical devices they may need. Disclosing these relationships allows patients to have more informed discussions with their doctors about the care they receive.
On February 18, some of these organizations will begin to submit data to CMS on payments made to health care providers, including gifts, consulting fees and research activities. This date marks the first of two phases of data submission implementation under the Open Payments program. Later, in May of this year, manufacturers will complete the second phase by submitting additional, detailed payment information. We believe that this approach helps to ensure the accuracy of the data collected, and provides the time organizations need to make their submissions, particularly those with large data files.
Once CMS completes the two phases of data submission, health care providers and manufacturers will have an opportunity to review and correct inaccuracies. CMS will then post the data on our website by September 30. We are also collecting and posting information on physician ownership or investment interests in manufacturers and group purchasing organizations.
Through the Open Payments program, the combined efforts of CMS, participating health care providers and other stakeholders are building on current efforts to improve health care quality by increasing transparency and accountability in our health care system.