In a recent blog post, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS’) Administrator Seema Verma announced the agency’s plans to improve its quality Compare websites to help patients find health care providers in different settings across the care continuum.
There currently are eight separate quality compare tools on data.Medicare.gov — Hospital, Nursing Home, Home Health, Dialysis Facility, Long-Term Care Hospital, Inpatient Rehabilitation Facility, Physician, and Hospice. Each site functions separately, making them challenging to navigate.
CMS plans to transition to a unified Medicare Care Compare portal this spring that will combine and standardize the eight existing tools and allow a single point of entry for quality information. The agency also is working to develop a companion portal — called the Provider Data Catalog — that will allow Medicare researchers and stakeholders access to more detailed publicly reported data.
Any changes to the online tools will not change public reporting requirements.
Contact Senior Director of Policy Erin O’Malley at eomalley@essentialhospitals.org or 202.585.0127 with questions.
