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Auxilary Aids & Services

For information about the availability of beneficiary auxiliary aids and services, please call our Beneficiary Contact Center at 800-833-4455.

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Railroad Medicare Beneficiaries
Medicare's Open Payments Reporting

In 2013, a new initiative that was part of the Affordable Care Act called ‘Open Payments’ was announced. The goal of this program then and now is to increase public awareness and knowledge of the financial relationships between physicians/teaching hospitals and the manufacturers of drugs, biologicals, medical supplies, devices, and ‘Group Purchasing Organizations’, or GPOs. A GPO is a group of businesses that earn discounts from vendors based on their collective buying power.

Now that the program has been up and running for almost two years now, you can visit the Open Payments website and look up a doctor, hospital or company and see if any reportable payments exist.  In addition to viewing the data, you can also download the data to your computer.

If you search for a specific doctor, enter in their information (name, city and state are a good start) and if there is a record to display, you will see it at the bottom of the search webpage. Summary information for the year 2014 is provided. 

It’s important to note that financial payments or transfers of value do not necessarily mean a violation of law or an implication of fraud or abuse. This data merely reports financial relationships.

If you have questions about this initiative, or about your Railroad Medicare benefits, please call our Beneficiary Contact Center at 800-833-4455, Monday through Friday, from 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. ET. We encourage you to sign up for email updates. To do so, visit our website and click ‘EMail Updates’ on the top of the webpage to start the process. 

We also encourage you to visit our Facebook page at www.Facebook.com/MyRRMedicare

 

last updated on 07/14/2015
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