AMA Upset Over Medicare Usage Data Release

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

CMS has released physician payment and service data, physicians say they should have been consulted first

The Department of Health and Human Services has released a data set containing information on the number and type of healthcare services individual physicians and other providers furnished in 2012 under the Medicare Part B fee-for-service (FFS) program, according to Healthcare IT News.

This comes as part of a CMS strategy to be more transparent and the released data makes Medicare spending "more accessible, to help the public find patterns of spending that could be wasteful and might not be in beneficiaries' best interests," said Jonathan Blum, principal deputy administrator at the CMS.

However, not everyone is pleased CMS has released this information. According to Government Health IT, the AMA says physicians should have been given the opportunity to verify the data before its release.

“We believe that the broad data dump today by CMS has significant shortcomings regarding the accuracy and value of the medical services rendered by physicians," said Ardis Dee Hoven, MD, president of the AMA. "Releasing the data without context will likely lead to inaccuracies, misinterpretations, false conclusions and other unintended consequences."

Susan Turney, MD, president of the Medical Group Management Association, cautioned about "unintended consequences" and the effect the information could have on not just physicians but also Medicare beneficiaries. "This release could result in patients making decisions about their care based on faulty assumptions about physicians," she said. "Claims data are not a proxy for quality, especially when provided in isolation, from a single payer."

"If it turns out that we see more procedures, more drug spending, in one part of the country without necessarily seeing differences in quality or satisfaction of care, that's an important question for us to be asking," Blum said.