“About 570 organizations representing nearly 80,000 health care providers have signed up to participate in a White House pilot program to improve information sharing of claims data on Medicare beneficiaries, officials say.”
“The agency is still setting up its ‘sandbox’ for capturing claims data and making it useful to providers, but the system should be ready by mid-November, according to a CMS spokesperson. Only synthetic claims data is in the sandbox currently, but the plan is to allow a small number of providers production-level access to actual claims data to start.”
“With better access to Medicare data, health systems will be able to paint a more robust picture of patients’ health, the spokesperson said…”
“In the past, physicians’ knowledge of patients’ medical histories was based largely on the information the latter could recall on forms. That presents a challenge when many Medicare beneficiaries see multiple doctors at any given time and they’re expected to remember, say, the last time they were admitted to the emergency department or had a colonoscopy.”
“Claims data provides physicians with a blueprint of where all those records might be if they need to request them.”
“CMS’s endgame is an interoperable health system, meaning one that seamlessly moves usable data electronically from a patient or a care provider to other entities, allowed access under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the agency’s spokesperson said. Rather than simply printing out the information, it’s transmitted directly into workflows…” Read the full article here.
Source: Medicare data project gains momentum as CMS continues its push for interoperability – By Dave Nyczepir, October 16, 2019. FedScoop.
