By Charles Ornstein, ProPublica
@charlesornstein, 917-512-0222, Charles.ornstein@propublica.org
The volume of public data on our health care system keeps growing and growing. Here are some of my favorite data sets:
A good place to start is Data.Medicare.gov. This includes information about hospitals, nursing homes, doctors, dialysis facilities and home health care companies. Data includes demographic information (names, addresses, phone numbers), as well as quality and satisfaction measures. ProPublica used the emergency room quality measures to power its ER Wait Watcher app.
The federal government has also started making available online its deficiency reports for health facilities. It currently does so for nursing homes (scroll down under “related links”) and for hospitals (scroll down to downloads).
The Association of Health Care Journalists has created a friendly interface for hospital inspection reports and ProPublica has done something similar for nursing homes.
An underappreciated data set explores geographic variation in health care—how different parts of the country use health services at very different rates. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services makes several years worth of data available online.
There’s also an interactive dashboard that lets you play with the geographic variation data without downloading any data.
If you’re interested in Medicare’s payments to hospitals and doctors, you’re in luck. Medicare has posted online two years of data on payments to hospitals for inpatient and outpatient services (2011 and 2012) and one year of data on payments to physicians (2012). You can find it here:
ProPublica has created an app that allows you to quickly compare doctors in 2012 data. AHCJ has broken physician payments down by state and AHCJ also combined the two years worth of hospital data into a single file.
Finally, some other places to look:
Medicare cost reports. The website American Hospital Directory is a good resource for reporters on cost-report data. You can sign up for a free membership.
Healthcare.gov data on Obamacare plan premiums and copays:. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation also has a suite of data tools to cover the ACA.
Incentives paid to physicians for electronic prescribing (Look for this file: EP Recipients of Medicare EHR Incentive Program Payments)
