After 20 months of buildup, the federal government’s new Open Payments website finally launched last week—and landed with a thud. Massive and fragmented to the point of being, as one observer put it, “so complicated that it’s almost useless,” the system seems unready for prime time.

Still, the day when consumers can peruse dollars sent from vendors to physicians has arrived. At some point, the system will be user-friendly enough—if not for the general patient population then at least for “power users” like consumer watchdogs and investigative reporters. Should radiologists have any particular concerns?

“Our patients have the right to know when we are receiving payments from device manufacturers and drug companies,” Geraldine McGinty MD, MBA, chair of the American College of Radiology’s commission on economics, told Radiology Business the day after the launch. “When I’m a patient, I want to know that my doctor is choosing a particular drug for me, or a particular device to do an imaging test, because they think it’s going to give me the best care, not because they are receiving a payment from a manufacturer.”

That said, she added: “We probably wouldn’t have some of the wonderful innovations that we do have without industry-physician collaboration or industry-science collaboration. We want to make sure that we don’t hamper that, but, obviously, the key is transparency.”

This initial rollout of CMS’s Open Payments program—initiated by healthcare reform’s Sunshine Act—presents for public viewing consulting fees, research grants and travel reimbursements sent from vendors to physicians and teaching hospitals during the last five months of 2013. It shows some 4.4 million payments to 546,000 individual docs and more than 1,300 teaching hospitals, good for almost $3.5 billion.  

Beginning in June 2015, such reports will come out annually, reflecting data submitted to CMS by manufacturers and reviewed by doctors and hospitals—who are permitted to dispute information they consider inaccurate, according to CMS’s announcement of the launch.  

Shantanu Agrawal, MD, deputy administrator and director of the Center for Program Integrity at CMS, stressed that Open Payments does not identify which financial relationships are beneficial and which could cause conflicts of interest. “It simply makes the data available to the public,” he said in prepared remarks. “So while these data could discourage payments and others transfers of value that might have an inappropriate influence on research, education, and clinical decision-making, they could also help identify relationships that lead to the development of beneficial new technologies.”

McGinty said physicians will do well to simply exercise common sense—or, as she put it, to “make sure what you’re receiving from a vendor with whom you’re working passes the smell test. I mean, if I’ve traveled across the country to see equipment, I don’t think it’s inappropriate that they might give me lunch. But getting consulting fees that are well beyond fair market rate—that doesn’t pass anyone’s smell test.”

She added that interventional radiologists will probably come under the microscope more than their diagnostic colleagues. Interventionalists, she said, “are in a great position to help the manufacturers innovate for better patient care. We’ve seen a lot of exciting innovations in all areas, for example in mammography most recently with tomosynthesis. Clearly, when we lend our expertise, it is important that we are compensated. That activity takes you away from your other activities.”

CMS said it plans to introduce new tools to allow for easier data searches, the main area of criticism in much of the bad press that met the launch announcement.

“If there’s something wrong with the vehicle, that’s something that I’m sure they’ll eventually fix,” commented McGinty.

Click here to access the database.