“Today, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Seema Verma, outlined a new Data Driven Patient Care Strategy as part of the MyHealthEData initiative. This strategy strives to make CMS data more accessible and usable in a secure manner that honors the privacy of patients and ensures that CMS will support industry innovation in unleashing the power of data to drive system transformation – enhancing efficiency, improving quality and reducing cost.”
“There are three cornerstones to the strategy – putting patients first, increasing the amount of available data and taking an application programming interface (API) approach to exchanging data in a secure and digital manner.”
“CMS is committed to putting patients at the center of the healthcare system by empowering them with the data they need as consumers of healthcare to make informed decisions. In March, the Administrator announced the launch of Blue Button 2.0 to allow Medicare beneficiaries to take charge of their own data by providing them access to and the ability to share their claims data in a universal and secure digital format. Blue Button 2.0 is a developer-friendly, standards-based API that enables Medicare beneficiaries to connect their claims data to the applications, services and research programs they choose.”
“Empowering Medicare fee-for-service consumers with their data is not the only step CMS is taking. We are also encouraging Medicare Advantage plans to adopt data release platforms…”
“CMS is announcing the availability of a preliminary version of the 2015 Medicare Advantage (MA) encounter data. A final version of that 2015 data will be released later this year. CMS plans to release encounter records for subsequent service years on an annual basis…”
“Last July, CMS launched the QPP Submissions API, which is designed with continuous feedback from the health IT industry. This API increases the speed of submitting Medicare quality measures, and reduces reporting burden. The industry response has been extremely positive, with over 250 organizations to-date (registries, qualified clinical data registries (QCDRs) and EHRs) requesting access to QPP’s “developer preview” pre-release test environment…” Read the full report here.
Source: Data Driven Patient Care Strategy – April 26, 2018. CMS.gov.
