WASHINGTON – Data are so integral to the transition to value-based care that the health care industry must begin to think of itself as an information industry, according to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt.
“Health care will either remain a series of best guesses or it will turn into an information industry,” Mr. Slavitt said during his keynote address at an annual conference on health data transparency. This “requires an enormous amount of change and it is our job to help everyone adapt and succeed. The implication for us at CMS is that we need to be more modern, more strategic, and culturally a fast-moving, responsive, and transparent agency that leads and enables change.”
Gregory Twachtman/Frontline Medical News
Acting CMS Adminstrator Andy Slavitt called for better use of medical care data at the meeting.
Mr. Slavitt identified four key areas for focus: privacy and security, real consumer benefit, learning and productivity, and connectivity. To improve his agency’s connectivity to providers, Mr. Slavitt said that it has recently created a new email box – noinformationblocking@cms.hhs.gov – to allow doctors and others who are experiencing information blocking issues to help the agency address concerns.
“Data blocking will not be tolerated,” Mr. Slavitt said. “We don’t experience care in silos and our data can’t live in silos.”
To spur the transition to a more information-based health care industry, Mr. Slavitt announced a number of data-sharing initiatives aimed at spurring on further data transparency.
First, the agency will be releasing its data to commercial entities. “We are aiming directly at shaking up health care innovation and setting a new standard for data transparency,” Mr. Slavitt said.
Innovators will have access to granular CMS program data, including de-identified Medicare fee-for-service claims data, with the hopes that they will be able to create care management and predictive modeling tools.
“While this is a big departure, we do this with a clear expectation that you will create a new stream of tools that will improve care and personalized decision-making and we are allowing companies to combine CMS data with other data so even what were small silos of data can have enough credibility to have meaning,” he said, challenging other organizations to open up their proprietary databases and match CMS’ move to open its data to commercial interests.
Mr. Slavitt also announced that data updates will be available on a quarterly basis. “In an information age, it is just not acceptable that the most recent Medicare data available to researchers is from 2013.”
He called on innovators to build products not for just the healthiest and wealthiest, but for the sickest in the population.