Modern Healthcare reports: “The Obama administration is working to balance patient privacy with the promise of tapping into market forces to boost its four-year-old initiative to allow outside organizations to mine federal claims data for healthcare-quality improvement and cost containment.”
Last week the CMS issued a proposed rule under the 2015 Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act to let 13 current quality-improvement organizations and some newcomers sell their data-analytics products to businesses. This would include a mix of patient data from the private sector as well as from Medicare, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Only “authorized users”—healthcare providers, suppliers, employers, health insurers, medical societies, hospital associations, healthcare professional associations and state agencies — could buy these data analyses.
