New CMS Office to Manage Troves of Data

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently launched a new Office of Information Products and Data Analysis as it seeks to become more transparent with the data it holds.

The new office will assume responsibility for the following databases and services:

Chronic Condition Warehouse, with data files linked by a unique beneficiary identifier across the continuum of care from 1999 to the present;

Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey, providing “stable” estimates and information on the Medicare population such as expenditures and sources of payment for services used by beneficiaries, changes in health status, care satisfaction and usual source of care;

Medicaid Analytic Extract, which summarizes data from the Medicaid Statistical Information System;

Research Data Assistance Center, which offers training and technical assistance for external users requesting CMS data;

Medicare Data Sharing for Performance Measurement Program, providing extracts of all Medicare claims data to qualified entities that combine that data with claims data from other payers to create provider quality assessments;

Hospital Referral Region-level aggregated Medicare demographic, spending, utilization and quality information from CMS.gov and the Institute of Medicine;

Medicare Blue Button to enable beneficiaries to download their claims history; and

CMS Data Navigator, a Web-based search tool.

More information is available here.