July 31, 2013

Sunshine Thursday Morning

Open Payments, also known as the "Sunshine Act," relationship-data-collecting-period starts August 1, 2013, bright and early. Some of our customers are using CarePrecise data as the basis for the physician database underlying their Open Payments tracking process.

Starting August 1, manufacturers and suppliers have to start tracking payments and other transfers of value made to physicians and teaching hospitals, an certain ownership or investment interests held by physicians or their family members. Names, dates, values and other data must be captured, and will be required to be submitted to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in early 2014. Submission files specifications are available for review.

July 25, 2013

Two New Beta Provider Data Releases

This summer has seen one spectacular new release of healthcare provider data from CarePrecise already, and a second is on the way. The first one, released just a week ago, is already finding its way into EMR pre-population, new web apps, OpenPayments and HIE applications.

The Extended Professional, Group & Hospital(TM) dataset extends CarePrecise's flagship master database, CarePrecise Access Complete (CPAC), with verified group practice data for physicians and other providers, their hospital affiliations, medical schools and graduation years. The EPGH's Extended Hospital table provides an unduplicated list of all U.S. acute care, VA, children's and critical access hospitals that bill Medicare (essentially all of these hospital types bill Medicare, so this list is nearly complete; link it to hospital data in the CPAC, and you've got everything -- a more complete, up-to-date and verified database of physicians than the American Medical Association's list at a small fraction of the cost... plus more than 3 million other healthcare providers not included in the AMA data.

The EPGH has only been released in beta so far, and in beta it is being distributed to all current CPAC subscribers free of charge through September 2013. The EPGH/CPAC bundle is the only commercially available merged database of NPPES, LEIE, PECOS, PhysicianCompare and HospitalCompare data, and it contains all of the "hooks" necessary to link to CMS hospital quality data and forthcoming physician quality data.

Coming next is the beta release of CP ProCase(TM), a proper-case version of the name, mailing address and practice address in CPAC, for all approximately 4 million records. Using CPAC data for marketing and other communications will be easier and more professional looking. As with the EPGH dataset, the ProCase add-on will be available bundled with CPAC, and not separately.

Planned beta release of CP ProCase will coincide with the August 2013 CPAC update release. As with EPGH, ProCase will be distributed as a free beta for evaluation to all current CPAC subscribers. (Betas are not available on single download purchasers.)

And, as if that weren't enough, our popular software, CP ListMaker, is undergoing a rebuild to add EPGH functionality. (Proper casing is already a feature of CP ListMaker.) The new version -- 4.01 -- will sport new output queries that include the new extended data linked to list outputs, completely configurable to use the new information. Release date for CP ListMaker v4.01 is scheduled to coincide with the August CPAC data release.

Questions about the new products? Call your CarePrecise sales representative at (877) 782-2294.

July 19, 2013

New data on Physicians, Groups and Hospitals

We are delighted to announce that our new Extended Physician, Group and Hospital (EPGH) dataset is in beta release, and is available for CarePrecise subscribers to download. The new data adds rich physician information, including verified hospital and group affiliations and education data, to the popular CarePrecise Access Complete database of U.S. healthcare providers.

Practice groups and hospitals, as well as physicians and other professionals are all inter-linked within the vast relational database representing nearly 4 million healthcare providers in all. But the data is made accessible by CarePrecise's unique compression and record-linkage processing, so that it can be used in popular desktop database software, such as Microsoft Access and FileMaker.

The combined CPAC/EPGH database offers a 360-degree view of U.S. healthcare providers' data, and assimilates in a single database the information contained in the federal NPI database (NPPES), the Medicare database (PECOS), the federal excluded provider database (LEIE), Hospital Compare and Physician Compare databases. It is the only comprehensive source of this data in a single database environment, and it can be used on ordinary laptop and desktop computers with ordinary office database software.

The new EPGH dataset is not available separately, but as an add-on to the CarePrecise Access Complete (CPAC) database of all HIPAA-covered U.S. healthcare providers. Currently in beta release, the EPGH add-on is now available only to current quarterly and monthly subscribers to the CPAC product, pending the full release scheduled for this fall.

To review the fields in the new dataset, see the field list table on the CarePrecise Access Complete documentation page. Standard pricing of CarePrecise data products provides a single-user license; multi-user licenses and derivative product (limited publication) licenses are also available. Contact CarePrecise Sales at (877) 782-2294.