Analyzing Annals: The Medicare Data Release Conundrum
These papers (Medicare and Physician Payment Data: Is This Transparency? and The Medicare Data Release Conundrum) discuss the recently released Medicare payment data, which showed individual physician's payments from Medicare.
Use these papers to:
- How is Medicare designed? What do the different parts (A-D) pay for? Use www.cms.gov as a resource about Medicare.
- Interpret the report on a specific physician. What information can be drawn from this publicly available payment data?
- Is the release of information like this useful? To whom? Will it enhance patient care? Save money?
- What are the limitations of this data released by Medicare? How might these limitations lead to erroneous conclusions about a physician's practice or behavior?