subject: Centers For Medicare And Medicaid Services Announces New Information Tracking System [print this page] Youve likely heard the term dashboard as it relates to your car. However, it is also a term that is used in business to describe a web-based technology page which provides a real-time analysis of a business operation. In the same way that your car dashboard displays how your vehicle is performing, the dashboard of a business shows how it is performing.
Well, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has its own dashboard now and it allows them to track how much is spent on Medicare patients in hospitals. The expectation is that more data will eventually be added, but for now this new interactive CMS dashboard is geared toward helping the public visualize and analyze Medicare spending.
What the New CMS Dashboard Offers Medicare Beneficiaries
In response to a White House Open Government Directive (transparency) this new dashboard includes a limited set of diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) and hospitals paid under the Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS).
IPPS is the system for reimbursing hospitals for inpatient health care services at a predetermined rate for treatment of specific illnesses. When a hospital sends Medicare a bill, the diagnosis and treatment information assign the admission to a DRG. The DRG and other adjustments based on hospital characteristics and the patients stay determine how much Medicare pays.
DRG is a patient classification system that relates types of acute care inpatients treated to the resources they consume. The system looks at those cases that are clinically similar and that consume similar resources, says Alan Weinstock, insurance broker at www.medicaresupplementplans.com . CMS uses DRG grouping, pricing and editing software to calculate the DRG assignment and subsequently the reimbursement for every Medicare claim.
By matching each DRG with an assigned payment weight, Medicare beneficiaries as well as other Americans will have the ability to compare costs, to see where their taxpayer dollars are being spent and to understand what types of results are being produced. In addition, this information can be used by government and industry to assess health care policies, improve the management of health care and identify areas for change
The dashboard provides information on the top 25 DRGs as well as the top 10 hospitals for each of those DRGs. The information contained in the dashboard is based solely on Medicare beneficiaries in the Original Medicare program, not on Medicare Advantage participants.
CMS Dashboard Provides Comprehensive Data to Improve Decision-making
The ultimate hope is to deliver better health care across the country, says Weinstock. And toward that end the new CMS dashboard actually shortcuts the process of compiling the data from over 40 million Medicare hospital admissions beginning as far back as January 2006. The data will continue to be updated monthly.
The firm that developed the CMS dashboard, MicroStrategy, is a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software. The company suggests that their dashboards are well-suited for the CMS because they are able to display large volumes of information that provide Medicare beneficiaries with the ability to see how their tax dollars are spent.
