CMS Physician Compare Data

CMS offers Physician Compare Data for comparing the quality of Medicare providers.

CMS describes the Physician Compare data in the following way:

"These are the official datasets associated with the Medicare.gov Physician Compare Website provided by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). These data provide useful information about the physicians and other healthcare professionals currently enrolled in Medicare. The Physician Compare National Downloadable file includes general information, such as demographic information and Medicare individual-level quality program participation. The Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) Group Practice Reporting Option (GPRO) and Accountable Care Organization (ACO) downloadable files provide program year 2012 measure performance rates for four Diabetes Mellitus (DM) and one Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) quality measures. Measure data are available for group practices of 25 or more eligible professionals and ACOs that reported via the GPRO web interface. For information about public reporting on Physician Compare visit the Physician Compare Initiative page."

Physician Quality Reporting System has more information about PQRS.

CMS offers more information about Accountable Care Organizations in a number of ACO webpages.

Group Practice Reporting Option. has more information about GPROs.

In the main physician compare database, each record is unique at the professional/enrollment/Group Practice/address level.

Hospital affiliation data are based only on Medicare claims-based linkages, so the affiliated hospitals for a particular professional listed on the website and on the downloadable file may not be the same.

Source Description
Stata
SAS
CSV
Desc
Documentation
zip
Main Database
dta
sas7bdat
csv
desc
pdf
PQRS ACO
dta
sas7bdat
csv
desc
pdf
PQRS GPRO
dta
sas7bdat
csv
desc
pdf

Updates and changes.

Contact data@nber.org with questions, comments, or suggestions.

Last Update Created by Jean Roth February 25, 2014