By Lisa Rosenbaum April 23, 2014 Jean Malouin, a family doctor in Michigan, woke up one morning earlier this month to an e-mail from a Washington Post reporter, who informed her that a vast release of Medicare payment data from 2012 had identified her as the highest female biller in the country, and the seventeenth-highest over all, with more than seven million dollars in payments.
Jean Malouin, a family doctor in Michigan, woke up one morning earlier this month to an e-mail from a Washington Post reporter, who informed her that a vast release of Medicare payment data from 2012 had identified her as the highest female biller in the country, and the seventeenth-highest over all, with more than seven million dollars in payments.
To do so, we use customer and payment data from a leading European online dating platform that has been operational for approximately 10 years.
They note that financial institutions across the banking, insurance and investment sectors have already started using big data techniques, such as aggregator services using financial and payment data from bank accounts of consumers for dashboard and accounting products.
Such a resource would bring together encounter and payment data from Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial insurers and could be a tremendous resource for price transparency, quality oversight, policy research, and health systems transformation.
For this study, we used payment data from the initial database, released in October, 2010.
Of the CareSouth patients, 43% had dual eligibility for Medicaid and Medicare, and we also obtained Medicare payment data from the South Carolina Office of Research and Statistics for the dually eligible patients.
Medicare payment data from the SEER-Medicare database was used to estimate monthly phase-specific total and disease-related medical costs [ 12].
Comparing the prevalence data from Table 2 to the average per beneficiary payment data from Table 3, it is apparent that a disproportionate share of Medicare payments is spent treating beneficiaries with chronic conditions.
The use of physician payment data from pharmaceutical companies is novel, to our knowledge, and our study provides insights into the methods, feasibility, and limitations of using such datasets for studies of discrepancies between payments known to have occurred and disclosure in peer-reviewed journals.
