Making Medicare Data Useful

Medicare’s release of physician reimbursement data is “unprecedented data” at work, as U.S. CTO Todd Park wrote. But what will researchers, and ultimately seniors and taxpayers, be able to learn from it? Quite a bit, the government is hoping.

Now that it’s older sibling, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, has released the data, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is out with a challenge for the private sector: Visualize the data for beneficiaries and taxpayers.

“These visualization tools should be created to be used by consumers, for the purpose of assisting in active decision-making processes, especially involving potentially expensive decisions such as referrals or whether to move forward with an intervention or procedure,” the ONC wrote in the announcement of its “Data Supporting Decisions Challenge.”