Building the Foundation for Medicare Data Transparency
CareSet’s work began with a series of FOIA requests to HHS and CMS, seeking a clearer view of how providers collaborate within the healthcare system. These efforts led to access to Medicare data, culminating in the release of the DocGraph Hop Teaming Medicare Referral Public Use File (PUF)—the first dataset to map patient-sharing relationships among providers.
This dataset opened new opportunities to examine referral patterns, provider collaboration, and healthcare delivery. Today, CareSet continues to expand access to Medicare data, helping researchers, journalists, and industry leaders use this information to support analysis and decision-making.
Research using our data
Our PUFs have been used by researchers who want to understand the structure of the healthcare system from a national level. Many in our research community examine how provider networks are related to insurance plans, SDOH, data interoperability, cost and quality outcomes, as well as the impact of COVID-19 on provider networks.
Health Services Research
- Graves, John A., et al. “Physician-patient sharing relationships within insurance plan networks. ”Health services research (2023).
- Lou, Qian, Nicholas Chong, and Candice Chen. “Independent freestanding emergency departments and implications for the rural emergency physician workforce in Texas. ”Health Services Research 55.6 (2020): 1013-1020.
BMJ Open
- Linde, Sebastian, and Leonard E. Egede. “Retrospective observational study of the robustness of provider network structures to the systematic shock of COVID-19; a county level analysis of COVID-19 outcomes. ”BMJ open 12.5 (2022: e059420.
Medical Care
- Everson, Jordan, and Julia Adler-Milstein. “Electronic Connectivity Among Us Hospitals Treating Shared Patients,” Medical Care 60.12 (2022): 880-887
Urban Institue
- Blavin, Fredric, et al. “Opportunities to Improve Data Interoperability and Integration to Support Value-Based Care.” (2022).
PubMed
- Physician patient sharing relationships within insurance plan networks – PubMed https://pubmed .ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36734605/
PubMed Central (PMC)
- Electronic Connectivity Among Us Hospitals Treating Shared Patient
Advocacy
CareSet advocates for the government to release and support high quality, and open healthcare data. We frequently submit comments on proposed rules to outline our support for data transparency and patient privacy. We lead a VRDC Users Group to help other researchers accessing Medicare and Medicaid data to voice their advocacy priorities to the government.