“As part of the Obama Administration’s efforts to make our healthcare system more transparent, affordable, and accountable, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has prepared a public data set, the Medicare Provider Utilization and Payment Data: Physician and Other Supplier Public Use File (Physician and Other Supplier PUF), with information on services and procedures provided to Medicare beneficiaries by physicians and other healthcare professionals.  The Physician and Other Supplier PUF contains information on utilization, payment (allowed amount and Medicare payment), and submitted charges organized by National Provider Identifier (NPI), Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System (HCPCS) code, and place of service. This PUF is based on information from CMS’s National Claims History Standard Analytic Files. The data in the Physician and Other Supplier PUF covers calendar year 2012 and contains 100% final-action physician/supplier Part B non-institutional line items for the Medicare fee-for-service population. While the Physician and Other Supplier PUF has a wealth of information on payment and utilization for Medicare Part B services, the dataset has a number of limitations.  Of particular importance is the fact that the data may not be representative of a physician’s entire practice as it only includes information on Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries.  In addition, the data are not intended to indicate the quality of care provided and are not risk-adjusted to account for differences in underlying severity of disease of patient populations.  For additional limitations, please review the methodology document available below. Data are available in two formats:

• Tab delimited file format (requires importing into database or statistical software; SAS® read-in language is included in the download ZIP package)
• Microsoft Excel format (.xlsx), split by provider last name (note: organizational providers with name starting with a numeric are available in the “YZ” file).

CMS has also created two summary tables: 1) aggregated information by physician or other supplier and 2) aggregated information by State and HCPCS code.   A detailed methodology document can be found in the Downloads section below which contains important information regarding the limitations of data usage.”