Medicare Geographic Variation Dashboard
Guidance for interactive dashboards that present information on state and county level variation in standardized per-capita costs for the Medicare fee-for-service population.
Final
Issued by: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)
Issue Date: February 28, 2020
The Office of Enterprise Data and Analytics (OEDA) at CMS has developed interactive dashboards that present information on state and county level variation in standardized per-capita costs for the Medicare fee-for-service population.
We standardize spending to remove geographic differences in payment rates for individual services as a source of variation. The standardized costs presented in the dashboard were not re-scaled to be equal to actual costs for the study population. In 2019, actual per capita costs for the study population equaled $11,112 compared to standardized per capita costs of $10,409. In general, total standardized per capita costs are less than actual per capita costs because we removed extra payments Medicare made to hospitals, such as payments for medical education (both direct and indirect) and payments to hospitals that serve a disproportionate share of low-income patients. Standardization does not adjust for differences in beneficiaries’ health status.
The dashboards include total standardized per capita spending, as well as standardized per capita spending by type of service. The interactive format allows users to select the indicator and year they want to display. Users can also compare data for a given state or county to the national average. All of the information presented in the dashboards is also available for download from the Geographic Variation Public Use File.
Click on the links below to open the dashboards.
State: Geographic Variation Dashboard
County: Geographic Variation Dashboard
Note: The County Geographic Variation Dashboard contains a large amount of data and includes five years of data for all 3,150 counties in the United States. Depending on your internet connection speed, the Dashboard may take a few minutes to load. If you have problems accessing the visualization, try closing out of other applications and refreshing the page. If you continue to have trouble, the data in the Dashboard can also be downloaded from the Geographic Variation Public Use File.
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