CMS Shuts Down Sunshine Act Database -- Again

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http://www.medpagetoday.com/PracticeManagement/Reimbursement/47415

CMS Shuts Down Sunshine Act Database -- Again
Published: Aug 29, 2014
By Joyce Frieden, News Editor, MedPage Today

WASHINGTON -- The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is again taking the Open Payments database, which details payments made to physicians by drug and device companies, offline for maintenance, the agency has announced.

The database, which was developed as a result of the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, has had various troubles of late. First, CMS took the site offline from Aug. 3 until Aug. 14 to resolve a problem in which records for physicians with similar names were getting mixed up. As a result of the problem, CMS said it would be excluding about a third of its records from the database until the issue is fully resolved.

Then it was announced that CMS would not be including another section of data -- regarding payments made indirectly, through contract research organizations, from drug and device firms to physicians -- in the database because of problems with data integrity.

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"It is clear that the government's website is not ready for prime time," AMA president Robert Wah, MD, said in the release. The news about the outages "supports the findings of a recent informal online survey conducted by the AMA, where 68% of the respondents said they had an overall poor registration experience and 62% of physician respondents who were able to access the system found that data contained in the reports was not accurate."

The informal online survey of 204 physicians also found that 44% of those who tried to register were unsuccessful.