Nation's first chief data officer shares CMS data strategies

BOSTON—The head of the new Office of Enterprise Data and Analytics, Niall Brennan, discussed data generation, privacy of that information, increasing transparency and future plans during his talk at the Big Data Healthcare Analytics Forum on Nov. 20.

As chief data officer, Brennan offered some high-level observations: As the largest single payer of healthcare services, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) receives billions of claims a year as well as billions of other non-claims data points.

“We’re in the midst of a data revolution. We’re sharing data in ways that were unimaginable 5-10 years ago. Part of it is a deliberate policy shift as we are moving from being a passive purchaser to a value-based purchaser.”

The new office, he said, “underscores how seriously we’re taking data right now and how we view data and deriving information from our data sources both internally and externally.”

CMS has made a commitment to increasing data transparency, he said, by creating the CMS Data Navigator and several public use data releases. “We’ve tried to push the envelope in recent years,” publishing data on county-level metrics. Users can download the data raw or use various dashboards for maps of geographic variation, for example.

Brennan also cited the Chronic Condition Warehouse which serves as a platform for internal analytics and an engine to a make data available to qualified outside users. “You need a good underlying platform to most effectively leverage the data and gain insights.” The warehouse contains 315 billion records with 1 billion more added every month.  “We’re constantly driving it and mining it for new insights.”

The Virtual Research Data Center is a new data access method, he said.  The agency used to provide data to qualified researchers and while the method never led to any security incidents, “we wanted a higher level of comfort when it stays in our environment.” Virtual access allows for that and is much less costly. Because users are only taking out aggregated results, they don’t necessarily have to maintain expensive hardware security installations on their own sites. “We’re very excited—this has the potential to be a real game-changer.”

Becoming proficient users of data doesn’t happen overnight, Brennan said. “Once people start investigating and learning and wowing people with their insight, they’ll get the bug. There are lots of great tools but it’s not like flipping a switch. It takes time because you’re changing culture.”

Data governance, while unsexy, is “absolutely key to this data-driven world,” he said. CMS has worked hard to establish a single source of truth but it is hard work. “We’ve made progress but we haven’t fixed it all. We’ve made great strides.” CMS now has a data governance board, for example.

While Brennan would not reveal specific data releases to expect in 2015, he did say, “I think people will be pretty happy as the year progresses.”