Did you or your practice receive payments from drug companies, device manufacturers or group purchasing organizations in 2016? These payments may have been for research activities, gifts, speaking fees, meals or travel. If so, this data is now publicly available on the Open Payments System, a provision of the Affordable Care Act which requires CMS to collect and publicly report this data. The site now compares payments for each physician to national and specialty averages, and highlights payments above the average.
We encourage you to look yourself up in the system, and be prepared to answer any patient questions about your financial relationships with these entities. You have until the end of 2017 to dispute any new data reported, but the site won’t be updated with corrections until January of 2018.
In total, there were $8.18 billion in payments attributed to physicians and teaching hospitals in 2016. Payments were made to 630,824 physicians and 1,146 teaching hospitals.
