5B. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) Dashboard

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has developed a series of dashboards, which are exciting new web applications that allow the public to visualize and analyze Medicare spending with unprecedented ease and clarity.  By simplifying and making data more accessible through dashboards, the CMS aims to facilitate the ability of researchers and policymakers to ask questions and quickly obtain answers, thus helping to accelerate efforts to improve the nation's health care delivery and payment systems.

To date, CMS has developed two dashboards that are available to the public on the CMS website at https://www.cms.gov/Dashboard/01_Overview.asp#TopOfPage.  Both dashboards have demonstrated success as evidenced by recently released metrics:

• The Medicare Inpatient Hospital Dashboard offers statistical views of the Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) data as it relates to claims payment and volume as collected by CMS.   This external-facing dashboard has had 1,495 hits since January 2011 and is currently available and refreshed the second Monday of each month.
  
• The Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit Dashboard BETA is a beta release and offers statistical views of the Prescription Drug Event (PDE) data as it relates to drug costs and utilization as collected by CMS.   Currently, HHS is planning to add the 2009 data in June; future releases may contain additional CMS Program data.  This external facing dashboard has had 1,297 hits since January 2011 and is currently available and refreshed annually after reconciliation occurs in June. 

In addition to these dashboards, CMS is in the process of developing two additional public-facing dashboards: the Physician Supplier (Part B) Dashboard and the CMS Enrollment Dashboard.  The CMS is projecting a Fall 2011 release for both dashboards.