Data made public by CMS includes information comparing the average hospital charges in 2012 for the 100 most common Medicare inpatient stays at more than 3,000 hospitals.
With the release of 2012 Medicare hospital charge data Monday, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services jumpstarted the two-day annual Health Datapalooza conference in Washington, D.C.
CMS released its first annual update to the payment data comparing the average amount hospitals bill for services. Now data for 2012 and 2011 is public.
The data posted Monday on the CMS Web site includes information comparing the average hospital charges for services that may be provided in connection with the 100 most common Medicare inpatient stays at more than 3,000 hospitals in all 50 states and Washington, D.C.
With two years of data now available, researchers can begin to look for trends in hospital charges.
CMS also expanded its offering of online query tools interactive dashboards for the cost data, as well as CMS Chronic Conditions Data Warehouse and geographic variation data.
But due to the size of the CMS data files now being released, data analysts should not expect to be able to load the files into Microsoft Excel or Access software. Instead heavier-duty data analytics software such as SAS will be required in order to perform analytics, CMS acting director of enterprise management Niall Brennan said.
During a breakout Datapalooza session on the newly released data, Brennan said that recently approved federal regulations mean that his office will now look at releasing similar data relating to Medicare Part D bills.
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In a separate announcement, the Food and Drug Administration launched openFDA, an open data initiative providing developers and researchers with access to high-value FDA public data through Web-based application programming interfaces and structured file downloads.
"These public data resources provide a better understanding of Medicare utilization, the burden of chronic conditions among beneficiaries, and the implications for our healthcare system and how it varies by where beneficiaries are located," said Bryan Sivak, HHS chief technology officer.
"This information can be used to improve care coordination and health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries nationwide, and we are looking forward to seeing what the community will do with these releases," Sivak said.
"Additionally, the openFDA initiative being launched [Monday] will for the first time enable a new generation of consumer-facing and research applications to embed relevant and timely data in machine-readable, API-based formats."
Scott Mace is the former senior technology editor for HealthLeaders Media. He is now the senior editor, custom content at H3.Group.