by Kerry Termine, DPT, HCS-D, COS-C
What is the Provider Data Catalog (PDC)?
The CMS Provider Data Catalog (PDC) is a website managed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). It serves as an interactive platform providing detailed CMS data, which is particularly useful for providers, innovators, and other stakeholders interested in healthcare quality data. The PDC contains general and performance information that is publicly reported on the Medicare.gov Care Compare site.
For home health, the data in the PDC related to home health agency demographic information and services comes primarily from the Provider, Enrollment, Chain, and Ownership System (PECOS). It also includes performance information on home health agencies. Important to note that not all home health agencies have performance information available in the PDC or on Care Compare profile pages.
New agencies or home health agencies that are not Medicare certified do not have information available on either site. The PDC is a valuable tool for quality improvement and offers a snapshot of some of the care home health agencies provide to their patients.
Provider Data Catalog (PDC) website also allows stakeholders and innovators in the field to easily access and analyze quality datasets available through an improved Application Programming Interface (API). These datasets provide information on publicly reported data, making it easily accessible and in a useful format. The datasets are interactive, downloadable, and are available for a variety of healthcare settings, including home health.
How to Access the PDC
Access to PDC can be found here. For home health, data on the PDC are updated once a quarter, typically in January, April, July, and October. These quarterly updates to PDC coincide with the quarterly refreshes of the Care Compare website.
Home Health Data on the PDC
In PDC, home health agencies and stakeholders can find all of the information pertinent to their provider setting by selecting “Topics” and then “Home health services.” The main page for the Home Health providers has information for providers sorted into four main categories: “About this topic,” “Announcements,” “About the data” and “Datasets”:
- About this topic: This dropdown contains a link to download all the current publicly reported datasets available for home health, as well as an associated data dictionary. There is also a link to “View archived data snapshots” which provides historic data from previous Care Compare and PDC public reporting updates. These archived files are available through 2015. Finally, there is a brief notification from CMS about using government data.
- Announcements: This main dropdown contains important recent announcements related to the home health updates on PDC.
- About this data: This dropdown menu contains many useful links for users.
- “About the data” provides information on the Quality of Patient Care Star Rating and the Patient Survey Star Rating.
- “Current data collection periods” displays all the publicly reported measures and the current data collection periods for the data displayed on Care Compare.
- “Measuring agency performance” provides an abbreviated synopsis of how CMS measures agency performance.
- “Process of care and outcome of care quality measures” lists all home health quality measures. It also provides information on the data sources, data exclusions and data collection information for these measures. There is information on the rate calculations for quality measures for individual agency performance and for national and state averages. There is information on how frequently the data is updated. Finally, there is information on statistical methods and the risk adjustment of outcome measures.
- “Quality measures” lists publicly reported measures, what they are, why they’re important, and are organized by measure categories.
- Datatsets: Contains all 9 home health agency datasets. These datasets have agency data results, state and national data results. The Patient Survey datasets are separate datasets.
The PDC is a gem of a website. This companion to Care Compare is full of current and historic data that many in home health are not aware exists. When you have a few extra moments, click on the links in this article to get a better idea of the PDC data available to you!
