Oops! CMS Data Integrity Questioned

One third of the records will be withheld when the federal government publishes data about payments to physicians from pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers, according to Charles Ornstein, writing for ProPublica. The reason? Data inconsistencies.

The problem came to light when officials of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) looked into a physician’s complaint that payments were being charged to him when they had been made to another physician with the same name. When the agency looked into the problem it found “intermingled data” which meant that doctors were being linked to medical identification numbers that were in error.

Ornstein quoted, CMS spokesman Aaron Albright who said, “CMS is returning about one-third of submitted records to the manufacturers and group purchasing organizations because of intermingled data, and will include these records in the next reporting cycle. These records won’t be posted until June 2015.” The number of records could be in the millions.

“CMS takes data integrity very seriously and took swift action after a physician reported a problem, ” said Shantanu Agrawal, M.D., CMS Deputy Administrator and Director of the Center for Program Integrity, in a written statement. “We have identified the root cause of the problem and have instituted a system fix to prevent similar errors, ” Ornstein reported.