The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) must submit an annual report to Congress in connection with the federal Sunshine law.  In addition to summarizing the process and outcome of the 2014 reporting period, the recently released annual report includes a few key takeaways for pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers and group purchasing organizations (GPOs):

• CMS intends to continue making enhancements to the Open Payments website so that all website visitors, including “advanced data users” and the general public, can “discover meaningful information.”  This will include providing the data in a dashboard layout and access to additional aggregate views of the data.
• CMS provided statistics demonstrating the significant amount of attention that the Open Payments database received.  This included over 13,500 downloads of the database, and nearly 1 million visitors to the Open Payments website.  Additionally, during the week of February 8-14, 2015, the Open Payments database received nearly 2.5 million unique page views.
• CMS confirmed that no civil monetary penalties (CMPs) have been imposed to date. The near-term objective of CMS is to focus on applicable manufacturers and GPOs that failed to register and submit data in the Open Payments system. CMS stated in the report that it is “engaged in an effort to increase submission compliance of specific entities that did not submit data.” CMS further confirmed that it “will launch targeted audits to identify applicable manufacturers and GPOs that should have submitted payment information but did not for 2013.”

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