The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has established its Office of Information Products and Data Analysis (OIPDA), which will oversee the agency's portfolio of data and information.
OIPDA will be responsible for making the development, management, use, and dissemination of data and information resources into one of CMS' core functions.
CMS provides healthcare coverage to more than 100 million Medicare, Medicaid, and Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) recipients. Medicare recipients generate more than 1.3 billion claims a year. The agency is now receiving data submissions under the meaningful use requirements of the Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Records Incentive Programs as well as Medicare Advantage encounter data. Starting in 2012, it will receive health insurance exchange data related to coverage expansions under the Affordable Care Act.
OIPDA will administer a new data and information initiative that CMS believes will be a key tool in the agency's evolution from a fee-for-service-based payor to a value-based purchaser of care.
As part of this initiative, OIPDA is soliciting articles for a new peer-review online journal, Medicare & Medicaid Research Review (MMRR). This publication will focus on issues relating to healthcare coverage, quality, and payment for health services. MMRR will also publish CMS Data Briefs, reports intended to summarize complex statistical topics in language understandable to health analysts and policy-makers.
Other new products and tools include the following:
- CMS Data Navigator: A Web-based search tool designed to enable users to easily locate CMS data in multiple areas of its website.
- Medicare Enrollment Dashboard: An online dashboard that provides and consolidates comprehensive statistics on Medicare enrollment since 1966.
- Medicare Geographic Variation Trend Date: A dataset that leverages almost 5 billion Medicare claims submitted from 2007 through 2010. To be available on the Institute of Medicine's website by midsummer 2012, the dataset will include demographics, spending, utilization, and quality of care statistics for analysis.
