On Friday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released a new online search tool for the Open Payments website, which allows consumers to see the financial relationships between drug and medical device manufacturers and physicians as reported under the Physician Payments Sunshine Act. This new tool provides the ability to search identified data for physicians, teaching hospitals, or companies making payments by name, city, state and specialty. Upon performing a search, the returned results will include all three payments types (general payments, research payments and ownership in companies) on one screen. When the website first went live on September 30, the search tool only allowed users to scroll through huge spreadsheets to look up information about physician payments.

CMS has announced that over the coming weeks, the search tool will continue to be developed to include more functionality with the objective of providing added value to users. Additional enhancements already in the works include displays of summary data, charts, graphs and more detailed data. 

Physicians can visit the CMS Open Payments website to view the data and use the new search tool.