The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released Open Payments data reflecting payments and transfers of value from drug and medical device companies to physicians and teaching hospitals in 2018, totaling approximately $9.35 billion in payments and more than 11.4 million payment records. This represents a 4.3% increase from the $8.4 billion reported in 2017.

The US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has released Open Payments data reflecting payments and transfers of value paid by drug and device manufacturers to physicians and teaching hospitals.

NHS England has published new guidelines on managing conflicts of interest. The guidance will come into force on 1 June 2017. It will be applicable to Clinical Commissioning Groups, NHS Trusts and NHS Foundation Trusts, and NHS England.

The guidance

This week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) published a refresh of its Open Payments dataset, which includes new data to account for the result of disputes and other data corrections since the last refresh in June 2016.

Last week, CMS posted the 2015 Open Payments data to its website, as well as updated payment records for 2013 and 2014.  Overall, manufacturers reported $7.52 billion in payments and ownership interests to 618,931 physicians and 1,116 teaching hospitals in 2015.  Nearly 1,500 companies reported making payments in 2015, comprising a total 11.9 million records.  Although the total number of records and amounts of payment are comparable from 2014 to 2015, there are shifts in the reporting of the nature of payments. 

CMS announced that it has updated the Sunshine Act / Open Payments dataset to reflect (1) changes made to records, (2) changes to delays in publication flags, (3) changes to disputed records, and (4) deleted records. 

On schedule, CMS released the 2014 Sunshine Act data, which shows $6.49 billion in transfers of value by pharmaceutical and medical-device manufacturers to physicians and teaching hospitals.  The data covers 11.4 million financial transactions attributed to over 600,000 physicians