MDS Alert

Plus: Stakeholders can access provider data more easily soon, too.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is combining its eight various provider comparison tools into one: Medicare Care Compare.

A CMS news release about the change explains that the current eight provider comparison tools all function independently with different user interfaces; the new Medicare Care Compare will have a single, consistent user interface that is easier for beneficiaries and their caregivers or representatives to navigate.

“In the new, unified experience, patients will be able to easily find the information that is most important to help make health care decisions, like getting quality data by the type of health care provider,” CMS says in a blog post.

CMS is also working on a “Provider Data Catalog” tool that provides access to the more in-depth publicly reported data that researchers and Medicare stakeholders need. “It will have an improved interface and intuitive search features to allow users to easily search and download CMS’ publicly reported data, better serving stakeholders who use the interactive and downloadable datasets like those currently found on data.Medicare. gov. Importantly, all data sets will be made available via an Application Programming Interface (API) from the Provider Data Catalog,” CMS explains.

CMS says that it is not changing any of the reporting requirements already in place and will continue to meet those mandates.

The new tools will be released this spring and users can try them out alongside the existing tools during a transition period, before the latter are retired.