Pharma Pays $825 Million to Doctors and Hospitals, ACA’s Sunshine Act Reveals

Pharma Pays $825 Million to Doctors and Hospitals, ACA’s Sunshine Act Reveals

A not so well-known provision of the Affordable Care Act is the Sunshine Act. The purpose of this act is to increase the transparency in the health care market by requiring doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and medical device manufacturers to disclose their financial relationships. Mandated by the Sunshine Act, on September 30^th, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) publicly released the first set of data, under the Open Payments title. This data includes $3.5 billion paid to over half a million doctors and teaching hospitals in the last five months of 2013.
A subset of Open Payments data that is individually identifiable  includes two categories of payments. The first category are the payments that are made for other reasons such as travel reimbursement, royalties, speaking and consulting fees and the second are payments which are made as research grants. These datasets together include more than 2.3 million financial transactions which amount to a total of more than $825 million.

Doctors net billions from drug firms - Yahoo Finance 

Drug and medical-device companies paid at least $3.5 billion to U.S. physicians and teaching hospitals during the final five months of last year, according to the most comprehensive accounting so far of the financial ties that some critics say have compromised medical care.

The figures come from a new federal government transparency initiative. The 2010 Affordable Care Act included a provision dubbed the Sunshine Act, which requires manufacturers of drugs and medical devices to disclose the payments they make to physicians and teaching hospitals each year for services such as consulting or research. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services compiled the records into a database posted online Tuesday, though the agency said that about 40% of the payment information won't identify the recipients because of data problems.

The database revealed some eye-popping totals, such as the $122.5 million paid by Roche Holding AG's Genentech unit to City of Hope medical center in Duarte, Calif., as royalties on sales of several products including blockbuster cancer treatments Herceptin and Avastin.

What We’ve Learned From Four Years of Diving Into Dollars for Docs - ProPublica

What to be Wary of in the Govt’s New Site Detailing Industry Money to Docs - ProPublica

• * The data doesn’t cover all payments.
• * By design, some data on research payments won't be included.
• * Because of errors, additional data isn't being released.
• * Not all payments have the same significance. 
• * This is the first federal release of this data: Expect errors.    

CMS Issues Final Rule on “Sunshine” Provisions of ACA - 2013 - Washington Highlights - Government Affairs - AAMC

February 8, 2013—The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a Feb. 8 final rule on the physician payment sunshine provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, P.L. 111-148 and P.L. 111-152).  The rule, “Transparency Reports and Reporting of Physician Ownership or Investment Interests,” requires manufacturers of drugs, devices, biologicals, and medical supplies to report annually to CMS any payments or transfers of value made to physicians and teaching hospitals.

Under the final rule, those manufacturers must begin collecting payment data on Aug. 1, 2013.  The data collected for the remaining five months of 2013 must be reported to CMS by March 31, 2014.  The resulting database will be made publicly available by Sept. 30, 2014.

Physician Payment Sunshine Act
Physician Payment Sunshine Act: A Primer | Research | American Action Forum
Toolkit for Physician Financial Transparency Reports (Sunshine Act)

Open Payments - Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services

• Applicable Manufacturers and GPOs: Correct Disputed 2013 Data by October 31 for publication on or before December 31, 2014.