Payments and gifts to doctors that could present conflicts of interest are about to be made public as part of a government database ordered by the Affordable Care Act.



The "Sunshine Act" website will reveal payments of more than $10 from drug and device manufacturers to clinicians, and will eventually allow patients to look up their own doctors online.



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The website will see a partial launch on Tuesday after several delays and warnings from doctors that the database contains errors and lacks context.Supporters of the Open Payments system said the launch is long overdue and important for consumers."From day one, the Physician Payments Sunshine Act database will be helpful in shining light on a part of medicine most people haven't had the time or opportunity to consider," said Sen.(R-Iowa), author of the language creating the database."Eventually, the database will become a valuable resource for all of us with a stake in our country's healthcare system. That includes individual consumers, insurance companies and taxpayers who pay for Medicare and Medicaid."Data available on Tuesday will primarily serve researchers interested in studying ties between drug and device manufacturers, and doctors.Roughly one-third of reported payments are being withheld in the first release due to confusion over who received them, just one of the challenges in the system's rollout.Doctors have several fears about the new site. One is that consumers will interpret all payments as suspicious when a large portion are part of clinical research projects, not gifts."Data released today are incomplete and may also contain errors," the American Society of Hematology said in a statement Tuesday."The release of these incomplete data without appropriate disclosures and/or explanatory statements as to their limitations and potential misinterpretations may result in inaccurate and misleading information about physicians and teaching hospitals."