I’ve always believed that transparency improves the efficiency of any system. Health care costs are no exception- and health care reimbursement costs are probably at the top of the list of systems that could be improved by applying a healthy dose of cost transparency.
Today the federal government took a giant step forward when they released a public data set called the “Medicare Provider Utilization and Payment Data: Physician and Other Supplier Public Use File”. It’s a huge database that contains information on utilization, payment, and submitted charges organized by Provider Identifier, Code, and place of service.
Placing this data in the public domain will give researchers around the country access to critical data that can be used to determine where additional system efficiencies can be found and to propose new evidence-based solutions to improve public health outcomes- while making the Medicare and healthcare delivery system more cost effective.
