Once again, CMS will shut down the Open Payments System for repairs, further evidence that the site is not ready to go public on September 30, the American Medical Association (AMA) said in a statement issued today. 

The federal Stark Law and the Maryland self-referral law have one key difference: Unlike the Stark Law, the Maryland law specifies which modalities meet the in-office ancillary imaging exception (IOAE). Quadri et al explore the implications of that key point of differentiation and its impact on results, in the latest issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology.

In a comment letter on CMS’s proposed approval of the Cologuard stool DNA test, ACR reminds the agency that CT colonography (CTC) does a superior job of detecting large advanced adenomas and asks that the same coverage standard used for the stool test be applied to CTC, for which CMS denied coverage in 2009.

The medical device tax, a key source of funding for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), fell 25 percent short of revenue expectations, says the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) in a report released this week.

After a two-week hiatus, the Open Payments system has reopened, and physicians can resume reviewing payments reported by vendors under the Physician Payments Sunshine Act.

As providers move toward managing—and assuming financial risk for—patient populations, the American Hospital Association has called on Congress to increase access to patient data across the care continuum, while protecting the privacy of patients.

When it passed the Affordable Care Act (and the companion Physician Payment Sunshine Act), Congress tasked physicians with one of the summer’s more frustrating activities, and this one is turning out to be more onerous than expected.

The ACR has joined the American Medical Association—and more than 110 other medical associations and societies—in asking CMS to postpone the deadline for physicians to register, review and dispute data in the Open Payments System prior to its scheduled publication on September 30, 2014. The current deadline for physicians to review the database looms large—August 27, 2014.