News: CMS to combine and standardize compare tools
CMS announced that the Medicare website will soon be combining its eight separate Compare tools into one, standardized and simplified format, reported HealthLeaders Media. Currently, CMS uses a combination of the following platforms on https://www.medicare.gov/ to allow patients to find and compare clinicians:
- Hospital Compare
- Nursing Home Compare
- Home Health Compare, Dialysis Facility Compare
- Long-term Care Hospital Compare
- Inpatient Rehabilitation Facility Compare
- Physician Compare
- Hospice Compare
In a recent blog posting, CMS Administrator Seema Verma said the new format will launch this spring and it will provide the same information split between the existing platforms through a single point of entry and simplified navigation.
"The new 'Medicare Care Compare' on Medicare.gov will offer Medicare beneficiaries and their caregivers and other users a consistent look and feel, providing a streamlined experience to meet their individual needs in accessing information about healthcare providers and care settings," Verma wrote. "In the new, unified experience, patients will be able to easily find the information that is most important to help make healthcare decisions, like getting quality data by the type of healthcare provider.”
Verma said CMS is also developing an improved "companion portal" that Medicare researchers and stakeholders can use to access the more detailed data, HealthLeaders Media reported. This new portal will be dubbed the Provider Data Catalog and will be housed on https://www.cms.gov.
"It will have an improved interface and intuitive search features to allow users to easily search and download CMS' publicly reported data, better serving stakeholders who use the interactive and downloadable datasets like those currently found on data.Medicare.gov," Verma wrote.
All of the data sets will be made available through an Application Programming Interface from the Provider Data Catalog.
"Even though we’re making these enhancements, it doesn’t change our public reporting requirements,” Verma wrote. “We will continue to meet every reporting mandate."
Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in HealthLeaders Media. Click here for ACDIS articles on Physician Compare. Click here for ACDIS articles on Hospital Compare.