Physicians and Teaching Hospitals

Physicians and Teaching Hospitals

What is Open Payments?

When a drug or device company gives a physician or a teaching hospital- stocks, money for research, gifts, speaking fees, meals and other payments- The Open Payments Program is required to collect information about those payments and share it with the public.

Why is Open Payments important to physicians?

Data about the payments you receive is shared on a public website, so your patients can see it. Before the public can see it, you are given a period of time to review (and dispute if needed) any data reported about you.

You should check your data every year, even if you do not think there is data reported on you. Drug or device companies could submit older data from previous years.  Once data is submitted, for the previous year or older years, the review and dispute period is the only time that physicians can use to dispute the data before it is public.

If you didn’t use the review period- check your data on June 30. If there is anything inaccurate, make sure you dispute it quickly.  Your chance to dispute the data will expire at the end of the year that the record is published.  For example, a record published in June 2015 can only be disputed until December 31, 2015.

Reviewing your data?

Register to review data reported about you.

Questions about Open Payments?

Contact the live Help Desk at openpayments@cms.hhs.gov to submit your question. You can also reach the Help Desk by calling 1-855-326-8366, Monday through Friday, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (ET) excluding Federal holidays.