HHS shares more Medicare data

In conjunction with the Health Datapalooza annual conference this week in Washington, D.C., the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has released new data and tools tailored to increase transparency.  

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) published its first annual update to the Medicare hospital charge data as well as data products and tools aimed to increase transparency about Medicare payments, according to HHS.

CMS’s website now includes inpatient and outpatient hospital charge data for 2012, including information comparing the average charges for services that may be provided in connection with the 100 most common Medicare inpatient stays at over 3,000 hospitals in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. With two years of data available, trends research is possible. “For example, average charges for medical back problems increased nine percent from $23,000 to $25,000, but the total number of discharges decreased by nearly 7,000 from 2011 to 2012,” according to the agency’s announcement.

CMS also released new and updated information on chronic conditions among Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries, including:

• Geographic data summarized to national, state, county and hospital referral regions levels for the years 2008-2012;

• Data for examining disparities among specific Medicare populations
• Data on prevalence, utilization of select Medicare services and Medicare spending;
• Interactive dashboards that provide customizable information about Medicare beneficiaries with chronic conditions at state, county and hospital referral regions levels for 2012; and
• Chartbooks and maps.

In other news, the FDA launched a new initiative, openFDA, to make FDA’s publicly available data accessible in a structured, computer readable format so technology specialists and researchers can quickly search, query or pull massive amounts of information on an as needed basis, according to HHS. The initiative will begin with a pilot program involving millions of reports of drug adverse events and medication errors submitted to the FDA from 2004 to 2013. The pilot will later be expanded to include the FDA’s databases on product recalls and product labeling.

“The release of these datasets furthers the administration’s efforts to increase transparency and support data-driven decision making which is essential for healthcare transformation,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in a statement.