Health Sunshine Act Didn’t Reveal All It Was Supposed To

When the Open Payments launched earlier this month, it had the same kinds of small glitches that many major site launches have. But this site, designed solely to shed light on B2B medical payments, skipped some $1.1 billion in transactions, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

That omission represents about one-fourth of the total value of all transactions reported to the agency coordinating the effort, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

“Most [of the missing payments] are related to research funding that was not available to us,” a CMS spokesperson told the Journal. “Other [payments] were in disputed ownership and investments. More updates to come in [the] next round.”

This is the first time the U.S. government has attempted this large a medical disclosure project so holes and problems are to be expected.

The “CMS had previously indicated that details on 9,000 payments that had been disputed by doctors or hospitals were not included in the database initially because the disputes had not been resolved. These payments, by the way, comprise about half of the $1.1 billion that was not initially disclosed. Doctors and hospitals have the right to review and protest payment data submitted by drug and device makers,” the story reported. “The agency had also previously noted that data on 190,000 research payments – which comprise the balance of the $1.1 billion in transactions not disclosed last week – would be withheld since these relate to drugs and devices that are not yet being marketed. Disclosure must be withheld for four years or until a product is approved by the FDA.”