
Major joint replacements cost Medicare more than $6B in 2011
Yesterday there was quite a bit of buzz about the release of Medicare’s inpatient payments for the top 100 diagnosis related groups. The Washington Post published some highlights on the data including a neat widget to visualize the data. We decided to take our own shot at it. This was a fun dataset for us since we were able to leverage a ton of work that we’ve already done. We had already standardized entities for hospital, organization, DRG, and city from other CMS datasets. I downloaded the data at 3 PM and had it up and running on karmadata by 5. We added a couple of calculated measures for total amount paid by Medicare and discrepancy between amount charged and amount received, and started making datacards.
Here’s what folks are saying: