New CMS Web Site Shines Light On Medicare Spending

A new Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Web site is making more claims data available to the public, Modern Healthcare reports. The so-called "CMS Dashboard" reveals Medicare spending for the top 25 conditions in hospitals, and allows users to compare spending by state, conditions by spending and to review the top-10-spending states for each condition. Medicare Advantage patients are not included in the data set (Evans, 4/7).

CMS will also release data sets that include all Medicare claims for a five percent sample of beneficiaries later this year, CQ Health Beat reports. "Researchers have long urged Medicare to give them wider access to such data so they can unearth ways to improve the efficiency of health care." The releases are part of the Obama administration's "Open Government Directive" (Reichard, 4/7).