Medicare Plans to Merge Provider Compare Sites

Jonathan M. Gold, JD, AMRPA Director of Government Relations & Regulatory Counsel

Highlights: » Quality data for all settings of care will be available via just one website » Reporting requirements for providers will remain unchanged

26 AMRPA Magazine / March 2020 On January 23, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Seema Verma announced that the agency intended to merge all existing provider Compare websites – including IRF Compare – into one Medicare-wide provider Compare site. Currently, there are eight different Medicare Compare sites for different sites and types of care. The current sites include IRF Compare, Hospital Compare, Nursing Home Compare, Home Health Compare, Dialysis Facility Compare, Long-term Care Hospital Compare, Physician Compare and Hospice Compare. The new, combined site will be called “Medicare Compare,” and it is scheduled to be released in spring 2020.

In her announcement, Verma said that although the current Compare sites are popular, the separate sites are not standardized and can be difficult to navigate for consumers. The new site will standardize how quality and other information is presented about providers, and Verma says this will make it easier for beneficiaries to find the information they are seeking. This initiative builds on the broader “eMedicare” initiative that the agency announced in 2018. This initiative has been seeking to make health care information more accessible to consumers and stakeholders, and has rolled out other new products such as the “What’s Covered” mobile application for finding Medicare benefits.

The agency states that the combining of the existing sites will not alter quality reporting requirements for providers, and that all of the currently reported information will still be available to the public. In addition, Verma said that CMS will also be introducing a new site called the “Provider Data Catalog,” which will be designed for use by researchers and stakeholders. Verma’s announcement says this second site will have intuitive search features for data sets, which will also be made available via an application programming interface (API).

CMS has not announced an exact date the new sites will be released, but says it expects the new Medicare Compare site to be available sometime in spring 2020. In addition, Verma said that the agency will continue to run the separate provider Compare sites for an unspecified amount of time after the new sites are available. CMS has begun working with stakeholders, including AMRPA, to collect feedback on the new sites and tools, and says it will continue to accept feedback and make improvements to the sites.

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