This data set, which we got from a carefully formed FOIA request against the Medicare claims database, shows how hospitals, doctors and other organizations work together. This conglomeration of data set shows everything — from the connections between doctors who refer their patients to each other to any other data collected by state and national databases. It displays real names and and will eventually show every city.
This data set could be the best source of public information about the quality of doctors ever. More importantly, it should help doctors to encourage other doctors to improve their skills — for example, by seeking board certification. This data set will allow patients and administrators to evaluate the health system on both micro and macro scales and give them the tools to take steps towards addressing inefficiencies.
How could it be used?
It is very difficult to fairly evaluate the quality of doctors in this country. Our State Medical Boards only go after the most outrageous doctors. The doctor review websites are generally popularity contests. Doctors with a good bedside manner do well. Doctors without strong social skills can do poorly, even if they are good doctors. It is difficult to evaluate doctors fairly. Using this data set, it should be possible to build software that evaluates doctors by viewing referrals as “votes” for each other.
Our goal is to empower the patient, make the system transparent and accountable, and release this data to the people who can use it to revitalize our health system.
Why does he need some money?
This data set can be made substantially more valuable by merging it with other “openish” data sources on the performance of doctors and hospitals. We want to turn this into the ultimate source for open doctor and hospital data.
Almost every State Medical Board in the US releases a report about the doctors in that state. This usually includes information on the doctors medical school, information about board certification and information on disciplinary actions against the doctor.
All of these state-level data sources believe that it is a appropriate to charge $50 to $1000 for copies of this data. Frequently, the states release data that is not yet linked to the NPI data. Sometimes some data is only available in PDFs etc etc. In short this data is currently available, but it is either messy, confusing and disconnected… or it is organized but expensive.
As a result it is not possible to get a full profile for a particular doctor, as they potentially move between states, without paying for expensive data aggregation services. These services charge as much as $150 to data on a single doctor. At those kinds of prices, there is simply no way that a data scientist can afford to really do any significant work on doctor data.
This crowd funded project will enable us to purchase all of this data from the various public sources that sell it, and then to perform the conversion required to merge this data with the core NPI database. Our calculations indicate that for $15k we can comfortably get the state medical board data from every state in the union.