HDG #002: Five (5) MUST-bookmark health data sets

Read time: 3 minutes

Today I'm sharing 5 super helpful sites that should live in ANY healthcare and/or data professional's Bookmarks.

I've come across a LOT of valuable data in my time.

I’m a health data guru.

For me, that means knowing about a lot of tools, data sites/sets, approaches, business/domain concepts, and most importantly—how to bring all this together.

I started in this career 13 years ago, and since then I have been a corporate analyst, a 2x startup founder, met a lot of people in the healthcare, community equity, and data space, and explored a LOT of data sources.

Here are 5 I still refer to at least once a month.

1. AHRQ CCS Groupers for Diagnoses and Procedures

   Here is my Guide on how to use them and where to find these CCS diagnosis and CPT/HCPCS procedure groupers from AHRQ. They help you group dozens of different similar dx's together into one (like grouping the dozens of individual codes into one high-level group of Diabetes).

2. Medicare Fee Schedule

   The Medicare Physician Fee Schedule Look-up Tool—every single healthcare professional should have this bookmarked, regardless of your role. On this site, you can look up the Medicare fee-for-service reimbursement rate, RVUs, modifier amounts and more for various procedure codes.

3. data.cms.gov

   Yes that is what it is called—it houses every single piece of CMS data under the sun, and there is a LOT. I particularly love their Physician PUF and MEDPAR data, which is Medicare utilization. Physician PUF has Medicare charge/allowed/utilization data by provider and procedure. MEDPAR is inpatient.

4. Health Care Cost Institute

   State spending trends and annual healthcare cost and utilization reports. They also make their dataset available for research. I like to use this to investigate cost of services and trends of services over time. Their hallmark report is annual.

5. Data USA

   Tons of descriptive social, economic, demographic, etc. data about cities, state, and regions. You can use this for health equity research, program/policy design, regional comparisons, or to sound smart about regions by looking up their key characteristics quickly. Sources data from multiple sites.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of helpful data.

In a future edition, I'll dive into each on separately.

For now, enjoy and let me know what other must-bookmark sources I should cover in the future!

-Stefany

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