CMS makes Medicare, Medicaid data easier for researchers to access
Researchers who want to study population health using the vast stores of Medicare and Medicaid data will no longer have to order it and wait for the federal government to ship them encrypted data files. Rather, they can now access the information virtually, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced Tuesday.
Moving toward virtually accessible Medicare and Medicaid data is part of the Obama administration’s work to make the health care system more transparent and accountable — and to help meet the pressing challenge of health care delivery system reform, CMS officials said in a news release.
The launch of the CMS Virtual Research Data Center (VRDC) took place Oct. 12 at the White House event Data to Knowledge to Action: Building New Partnerships.
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Part of the President’s Big Data Research and Development Initiative, which aims to improve researchers’ ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data, the VRDC is a secure and efficient means for researchers to virtually access and analyze CMS’s vast store of health care data, CMS officials said.
Researchers using the VRDC will access CMS data from their own workstations and will be able to perform analyses and manipulate data within the VRDC. The VRDC will help CMS meet these demands while also ensuring data privacy and security and reducing the cost of data access for most users.
“We’re acutely aware of the huge potential that CMS data holds for creating a more efficient, higher quality health care system, and researchers play a large part in this transformation,” said CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner. “By providing researchers with secure, timely, and affordable access to CMS data, the agency is making it easier to do the important research that will lay the foundation for better quality and lower costs in the health care system.”
According to CMS, the VRDC offers researchers several advantages over the traditional shipped encrypted data files. First, researchers will be able to access Medicare data at a significantly lower cost. Physical delivery of a large sample of Medicare Parts A, B, and D data can cost more than $100,000 for just one year of data. In contrast, using the VRDC, a single researcher conducting one project over the course of the year can access as much Medicare data as he or she needs for approximately $40,000.
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Second, researchers will not need to maintain expensive data infrastructures of their own because they will access the data in a CMS environment by means of a secure virtual desktop.
Finally, researchers will not have to wait long for data when they use the VRDC. Due to the time-consuming nature of physical data delivery, CMS generally only has shipped data to researchers on an annual basis in the past. However, researchers using the VRDC now will be able to refresh their data analyses routinely.
The VRDC also offers greater security for CMS to share data with researchers. The protection of beneficiary privacy continues to be a priority for CMS when sharing data. Under the VRDC model, sensitive individually-identifiable information about beneficiaries remains in the CMS data environment, which helps safeguard against breaches or unauthorized uses of the data.
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