This week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released a trove of data showing how much Medicare paid around 880,000 doctors around the country. The Center for Data Innovation submitted comments to CMS in September urging the agency to release the data, which promises to have applications in improving care coordination and hospital performance management, as well as physician recommendations in the federal Health Insurance Marketplace. Journalists have begun to dig into the data and identify the doctors who have billed for the most Medicare money, and the Washington Post has an online tool that lets users search for their own doctor.
The data is available for download in its entirety in tab-delimited and Excel spreadsheet formats.