Physician Practice

Part B payment and submitted charges data published

Physician Practice Insider, May 31, 2016

CMS’ annual report on Medicare physician utilization, payment, and submitted charges is now publically available. The data set covers 2014 and lists Medicare Part B charges and payments with information on services and procedures provided. Data for more than 900,000 physicians and other providers is available in the files. Physicians and other providers received roughly $91 billion in Part B payments, according to the report.

The data was collected from CMS administrative claims data. The information is available in two forms: an online interactive dataset and a downloadable tab delimited file format.

The report uses Medicare standardized payment amounts, adjusted for geographic differences to allow physicians to compare payments across the country. Physicians can use the report to compare payments based on range and complexity of care and differences in reimbursement based on specialty.

Physicians are not given the opportunity to review this data before it’s published. Because the data includes only Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries, it may not represent a physician’s entire practice. The data is not risk adjusted and is not intended to show quality of care, CMS says.

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