As the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services prepares to release payment information for individual doctors, AHCJ will host a webcast to help reporters find the stories in the data.
AHCJ will host a webcast at 4 p.m. ET Wednesday about the CMS data with details of Medicare payments to individual physicians and other health care professionals. The details will include the number and type of services provided, and the amount paid for those services delivered in 2012.
Journalists can use this data to help consumers to make more informed choices about the care they receive. AHCJ has long advocated for the release of this data.
The new data provides a more detailed picture of how physicians practice in the Medicare program, and the payments they receive. This data contains information on more than 880,000 health care professionals in all 50 states who collectively received $77 billion in payments in 2012 for services delivered to beneficiaries under the Medicare Part B Fee-For-Service program. With this data, it will be possible to conduct a wide range of analyses that compare 6,000 different types of services and procedures provided, as well as payments received by individual health care providers.
Speakers:
-
Niall Brennan, acting director, CMS Offices of Enterprise Management
-
Marc Hartstein, director, CMS Center for Medicare’s Hospital and Ambulatory Policy Group
-
Charles Ornstein, senior reporter, ProPublica; member of AHCJ board of directors
-
Christopher Powers, acting director of the CMS Office of Information Products and Data Analytics’ Information Products Group
<!–
How to participate:
To participate in the webcast, click here, chose the “Enter as a Guest” option, type in your name and click on the “Enter Room” button.
–>
Related
-
Charles Ornstein: Caution in order when tackling newly released Medicare data
-
Intro to investigating health data using spreadsheets
This tutorial will give you a jumpstart on using spreadsheets to investigate health data. While it’s important to remember that a spreadsheet can give you a lead but can’t replace your news judgment, this will help you navigate around spreadsheets, understand some basic references and learn some good practices in dealing with data. -
Finding patterns and trends in health data: Pivot tables in spreadsheets
Excel pivot tables are a powerful way to organize, interpret and manipulate numerical data. In this tip sheet, reporters will learn the skills necessary to apply these tables in real-world situations,