Three healthcare researchers from the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at the Brookings Institute are calling CMS to release more complete data for analysis.
The three researchers wrote about disparities in CMS' Medicare Part B physician payment data in a Health Affairs blog post. One of the things they highlighted was difference in practice patterns based on geographic area and classification of payment being too incomplete for proper analysis.
They recommended a number of changes for future data releases, including: integrating data sources to identify harmful financial incentives, developing a continual data verification system, making data more accessible to all researchers without steep fees and including facility cost data, patient data, geographic benchmarks and time-series data.
"Though the release of the Medicare physician payment dataset signified a historically large step toward transparency, there is still a long way to go before these data can be considered useful for analysis," the authors wrote.