Approaches to Identify Nursing Home Specialists Using Medicare Claims Data.

Abstract

Background: Physicians and advanced practice clinicians who practice in nursing homes (NHs) are becoming increasingly specialized. Studies have identified clinicians as NH specialists using multiple data sources; yet, researchers' access to several sources may be limited due to required data purchases.

Objective: Examine the concordance of 2 approaches to measure NH specialization versus a standard approach using clinician-level Medicare Data on Provider Practice and Specialty (MD-PPAS). These alternative approaches leveraged: (1) publicly available clinician-level Medicare Part B data; and (2) patient-level Medicare Part D Event claims linked to publicly available clinician-level Medicare Part D prescribers data.

Research design: Yearly cross-sections from 2016 to 2020.

Subjects: Physicians and advanced practice clinicians with at least one Medicare-paid service to NH residents and at least 100 total services in a given year.

Measures: Nursing home specialists were classified as clinicians with ≥90% of annual services provided to NH residents.

Results: Between 2016 and 2020, NH specialists comprised 49,542 of 321,267 eligible clinician-years (15.4%) in MD-PPAS data; 35,983 of 189,992 eligible clinician-years (18.9%) in Part B data; and 31,148 of 1,101,484 eligible clinician-years (2.8%) in Part D data. Compared with the MD-PPAS approach, the concordance was greater for the Part B approach (sensitivity 71.8%, specificity 99.7%) than the Part D approach (39.4%, 97.6%).

Conclusions: There were large differences in the numbers of eligible clinicians and NH specialists identified by 3 approaches. The Part B approach was reasonably concordant with the MD-PPAS approach and could be considered by researchers without the financial resources required to purchase MD-PPAS data.