Medicare releases physician claims data for public consumption

Last week, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released on its website a data set detailing payments made in 2012 to more than 880,000 physicians from the Medicare Part B Fee-for-Service program.

The release of the physician claims data came in response to a legal challenge from the Wall Street Journal, which successfully argued for a federal judge to lift a 1979 injunction preventing CMS from publishing the information. CMS initially planned to evaluate requests for physician payment information on a case-by-case basis. But after receiving numerous requests for the Medicare data, CMS determined the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) required it to make frequently requested materials available electronically and publicly release certain physician payment information on its website.

This information represents revenue from Medicare Part B services before the practice’s operating costs are deducted. It doesn't include information from Medicare Part A (Hospital Insurance), Part C (Medicare Advantage), Medicaid, Marketplace, or private insurance plans. The data also does not include information associated with clinical diagnostic laboratories or durable medical equipment. Further, this data set does not represent each medical practice’s entire patient panel, and it is not risk-adjusted for severity and complexity of patients treated by the physician. 

The file contains information on utilization, payment (allowed amount and Medicare payment), and submitted charges organized by National Provider Identifier, Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System code, and place of service.

Physicians and others can access this information by downloading files split by provider last name from the CMS web site. Alternatively, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have created tools to search this data by name, specialty, and city/ZIP code.

In future posts, we’ll talk about potential implications of this data release, further limitations of the data, and possible questions you may get from your patients. In the meantime, be aware that the data is out there and that CMS is not the only one looking at it anymore.

– Kent Moore, Senior Strategist for Physician Payment for the American Academy of Family Physicians