Federal Government Agrees to Open Access to Medicare Data about Individual Doctors | Dark Daily

“In a big step forward for public access to data about provider outcomes, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will make its enormous Medicare claims database more broadly available... Both the press and the public will be able to search for information about individual physicians. It is likely that information about pathologists will be searchable in this manner. Specifically, Medicare will relax its restrictions on the release of information about individual doctors who participate in Medicare. This development was reported recently by The Wall Street Journal, which played a role in getting HHS to make physician data available to the public... [the] data has been largely inaccessible because of a decades-old court injunction...the result from a lawsuit jointly filed in 1979 by the American Medical Association (AMA) and the Florida Medical Association... in January 2011... Dow Jones & Company (DJ), publisher of The Wall Street Journal, filed court papers to overturn the injunction... the company maintained, it barred The Wall Street Journal and other news organizations from fully investigating and exposing abuses in the $500 billion system... The decision by HHS to provide public access to this data is consistent with the trend toward increased transparency in provider outcomes and provider pricing. Dark Daily has predicted that the Medicare program will eventually open data about clinical laboratory test providers and pathology group practices as part of this policy. The goal of the new rule is to give access to Medicare’s extensive claim database to employers, insurance companies, and consumer groups. It allows them to use the data to make comparisons in order to produce report cards on local doctors and hospitals...