Internet resources can provide benchmarks and analysis for Medicare Populations.
The CMS Chronic Conditions Data Warehouse website is located at www.ccwdata.org. As described on the site, the warehouse provides Medicare and Medicaid beneficiary claims and assessment data, linked by beneficiary across the continuum of care. This website provides dashboards that provide the ability to look at chronic conditions, by age, by location, or demographics. Other websites provide dashboards of health outcomes by state and zip code.
The amount of data collected by ACOs will grow rapidly over time and become a critical source for measuring quality of care, costs and operational efficiency. Generally, ACOs need to either build or outsource development of a central data warehouse to gather, store and analyze data. Development of a data warehouse happens to be one of the challenges of a big data implementation. Three characteristics of big data include size, complexity, and technologies. EMRs are optimized for rapid data input of transactions. Often there are a number of standard reports that can be produced for a given period of time, or as of the date they are run. A key aspect of transaction systems is also the amount of “care and feeding” they require. For example, updates, backups, disaster recovery, etc.
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