The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) launched Care Compare, which is a redesign of eight existing CMS healthcare compare tools available on Medicare.gov into a single resource, the agency announced in a press release.
Care Compare provides a single user-friendly interface that patients and caregivers can use to find comparative information on cost, quality of care, service volume and other data about doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, and other healthcare services.
Under the previous collection of individual websites, consumers would have to navigate Hospital Compare, Nursing Home Compare, and Home Health Compare individually to research providers for the different phases of a planned surgery and rehabilitation.
Care Compare includes consumer-friendly features, such as a design that is optimized for mobile devices and tablets. For example, consumers using the app on a smartphone can initiate phone calls to providers simply by clicking on the provider’s phone number.
While the measures and data used for Care Compare have not changed, the way information is displayed is different. During a transition period, consumers and other stakeholders will be able to use the original eight compare tools, CMS said.
In conjunction with the launch of Care Compare, additional improvements have been made to other CMS data tools to help Medicare beneficiaries compare costs. For example, the Procedure Price Look Up (PPL) tool now includes physician fees in addition to facility fees, offering people with Medicare a more accurate prediction of the true out-of-pocket costs.
