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What do you guys make of this and its impact on anesthesia?
Medicare announced Wednesday that it will provide complete, national physician-level data to a San Francisco-based start-up whose goal is to help millions of consumers nationwide make "more informed health care decisions, starting with the doctors they choose."
The firm, called Amino, launched in October. It is the second national organization – and the first for-profit company – to achieve special Medicare "qualified entity" status that bestows access to the full range of Medicare data for physicians and other healthcare providers.
In order achieve that milestone, Amino satisfied Medicare's requirement it could match the Medicare data with like information from private plans – in this case, a database of more than 5 billion claims from commercial insurers, representing care provided to almost 200 million Americans.
"Our goal is to give everyone the clearest picture of their health care choices, using the most comprehensive database on what actually happens inside hospitals and doctors' offices in America, CEO David Vivero told U.S. News.
Amino's data now "cover every practicing physician in America, about 890,000 or so," offering consumers insights into their care of nearly 1,000 diagnoses and conditions, he says.
The announcement reflects a major scaling up of the government's relationship with private-sector companies in an effort to expand the health care information available to Americans. For decades, Medicare data has been closely guarded, available only to researchers and others deemed worthy of special access. That changed with the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the establishment of the qualified-entity program.
The goal is to increase transparency and provide information to employers, consumer groups, patients, and others seeking to base their choice of a doctor, hospital or outpatient facility on something more substantial than the opinion of a doctor or friend.
"We've always believed that this is a fundamental game changer in terms of how American consumers receive up-to-date data and valid information about their health care providers," Niall Brennan, chief data officer and director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid's Office of Enterprise Data and Analytics, told U.S. News. "It was a huge step forward."
The information that results from Medicare's association with Amino will be provided free online at Amino.com. Initially, the company will help patients find doctors whose practice patterns and skills meet their needs and suit their preferences. Vivero says the company plans to roll out a wide array of information services that will provide answers to a broad set of health-care questions, including procedures, treatment options, and costs. An initial emphasis will be on services provided to women, especially C-section deliveries, because information on women's health care is in such short supply.
Medicare had previously approved 12 other qualified organizations, all but one of them regional. The other national organization, the Health Care Cost Institute, will combine Medicare information with claims data from four major insurers and providers – Aetna, Humana, Kaiser Permanente and United Healthcare – to study factors driving the steady growth of health care costs, projected to rise from $2.5 trillion to $4.6 trillion by the end of the decade. "We're starting to reach critical mass," says Brennan, who announced the relationship with Amino Wednesday on the CMS blog.
Vivero, a former vice president at Zillow, says the inspiration for Amino arose from his own experience at trying to obtain health insurance and providers when he left his job at the real estate company and struck out on his own. It's painful, he says, "to be on your own in health care."
With $20 million in venture capital investments, Vivero and his team have amassed private claims data from insurance companies and other vendors that enabled them to satisfy Medicare that they would could safeguard the data and provide a valuable service to consumers.
"We do have relationships with major insurers. We've purchased claims. We've traded services and analytics for claims. We've done a lot of work to assemble this de-identified data set," he says, adding, "We have a very long runway and very patient investors. Our goal is to get people the information they need right now."
He says the company is "unbiased," rejecting sponsored listings and paid advertisements. He is vague about how the company will generate revenue, saying only that it may offer premium services to consumers or additional analytics. "You can already book an appointment for free online with every doctor in America," he says. "We give that away. Maybe there are additional services we can provide around your payments or coordination of your care. We're still exploring options."
The company boasts a personalized, data-driven approach that matches patients with doctors based on the number of patients "like you" that they've treated—people with the same condition, same gender, and in the same age range. "We use a volume-based algorithm that spans 800 or 900 [health care] topics that we support," Vivero says. "Whether it's Crohn's or diabetes or whatnot, you can search Amino.com and find a set of physicians who have been proven to have expertise."
The website offers specific guidance for patients seeking seven procedures: C-section rates; mammogram same-day biopsy rates; gall-bladder removal outpatient procedure rates; hernia surgery outpatient procedure rates; minimally invasive vs. open hernia surgery rates; and a tool to help women estimate their odds of needing a C-section. "Women's health issues were something we wanted to speak to first," Vivero says. "That's why we spoke to mammograms, gall-bladder removals and C-sections."
The company's posted methodologies currently lack more substantive outcome measures, such as death and readmission rates, which offer a definitive measure of how well patients fared. Vivero says the company will be rolling out those and other metrics on a continual basis in the future, based on guidance from advisors that include some of the leading healthcare researchers in the nation, such as Dr. Ashish Jha of the Harvard School of Public Health and Dr. Arnold Milstein of Stanford University.
What do you guys make of this and its impact on anesthesia?
Medicare announced Wednesday that it will provide complete, national physician-level data to a San Francisco-based start-up whose goal is to help millions of consumers nationwide make "more informed health care decisions, starting with the doctors they choose."
The firm, called Amino, launched in October. It is the second national organization – and the first for-profit company – to achieve special Medicare "qualified entity" status that bestows access to the full range of Medicare data for physicians and other healthcare providers.
In order achieve that milestone, Amino satisfied Medicare's requirement it could match the Medicare data with like information from private plans – in this case, a database of more than 5 billion claims from commercial insurers, representing care provided to almost 200 million Americans.
"Our goal is to give everyone the clearest picture of their health care choices, using the most comprehensive database on what actually happens inside hospitals and doctors' offices in America, CEO David Vivero told U.S. News.
Amino's data now "cover every practicing physician in America, about 890,000 or so," offering consumers insights into their care of nearly 1,000 diagnoses and conditions, he says.
The announcement reflects a major scaling up of the government's relationship with private-sector companies in an effort to expand the health care information available to Americans. For decades, Medicare data has been closely guarded, available only to researchers and others deemed worthy of special access. That changed with the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the establishment of the qualified-entity program.
The goal is to increase transparency and provide information to employers, consumer groups, patients, and others seeking to base their choice of a doctor, hospital or outpatient facility on something more substantial than the opinion of a doctor or friend.
"We've always believed that this is a fundamental game changer in terms of how American consumers receive up-to-date data and valid information about their health care providers," Niall Brennan, chief data officer and director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid's Office of Enterprise Data and Analytics, told U.S. News. "It was a huge step forward."
The information that results from Medicare's association with Amino will be provided free online at Amino.com. Initially, the company will help patients find doctors whose practice patterns and skills meet their needs and suit their preferences. Vivero says the company plans to roll out a wide array of information services that will provide answers to a broad set of health-care questions, including procedures, treatment options, and costs. An initial emphasis will be on services provided to women, especially C-section deliveries, because information on women's health care is in such short supply.
Medicare had previously approved 12 other qualified organizations, all but one of them regional. The other national organization, the Health Care Cost Institute, will combine Medicare information with claims data from four major insurers and providers – Aetna, Humana, Kaiser Permanente and United Healthcare – to study factors driving the steady growth of health care costs, projected to rise from $2.5 trillion to $4.6 trillion by the end of the decade. "We're starting to reach critical mass," says Brennan, who announced the relationship with Amino Wednesday on the CMS blog.
Vivero, a former vice president at Zillow, says the inspiration for Amino arose from his own experience at trying to obtain health insurance and providers when he left his job at the real estate company and struck out on his own. It's painful, he says, "to be on your own in health care."
With $20 million in venture capital investments, Vivero and his team have amassed private claims data from insurance companies and other vendors that enabled them to satisfy Medicare that they would could safeguard the data and provide a valuable service to consumers.
"We do have relationships with major insurers. We've purchased claims. We've traded services and analytics for claims. We've done a lot of work to assemble this de-identified data set," he says, adding, "We have a very long runway and very patient investors. Our goal is to get people the information they need right now."
He says the company is "unbiased," rejecting sponsored listings and paid advertisements. He is vague about how the company will generate revenue, saying only that it may offer premium services to consumers or additional analytics. "You can already book an appointment for free online with every doctor in America," he says. "We give that away. Maybe there are additional services we can provide around your payments or coordination of your care. We're still exploring options."
The company boasts a personalized, data-driven approach that matches patients with doctors based on the number of patients "like you" that they've treated—people with the same condition, same gender, and in the same age range. "We use a volume-based algorithm that spans 800 or 900 [health care] topics that we support," Vivero says. "Whether it's Crohn's or diabetes or whatnot, you can search Amino.com and find a set of physicians who have been proven to have expertise."
The website offers specific guidance for patients seeking seven procedures: C-section rates; mammogram same-day biopsy rates; gall-bladder removal outpatient procedure rates; hernia surgery outpatient procedure rates; minimally invasive vs. open hernia surgery rates; and a tool to help women estimate their odds of needing a C-section. "Women's health issues were something we wanted to speak to first," Vivero says. "That's why we spoke to mammograms, gall-bladder removals and C-sections."
The company's posted methodologies currently lack more substantive outcome measures, such as death and readmission rates, which offer a definitive measure of how well patients fared. Vivero says the company will be rolling out those and other metrics on a continual basis in the future, based on guidance from advisors that include some of the leading healthcare researchers in the nation, such as Dr. Ashish Jha of the Harvard School of Public Health and Dr. Arnold Milstein of Stanford University.
