News-At-A-Glance: CMS Releases New Data for Hospitals

On June 2, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released its first annual update to Medicare hospital charge data, which includes data from 2012. The update includes data comparing the amount a hospital bills for similar inpatient and outpatient services. CMS announced the release of the data and other tools to support its efforts to increase transparency concerning Medicare payments at its annual Datapalooza conference in Washington, D.C. The hospital charge data include the average charge for the 100 most common Medicare inpatient stays for over 3,000 hospitals in all 50 states, according to the announcement. Also released is new and updated information on chronic conditions and geographic variation at the state and county levels and a variety of dashboards and data warehouses. The Food and Drug Administration also announced a new initiative, OpenFDA, that will provide massive amounts of data in a structured, computer readable format. To find out more about these exciting initiatives and to access the data, go to the CMS Web site in the section for research, statistics, data, and systems.