Government Healthcare Policy, Business and Technology

New from the Digital Service team at CMS: Blue Button 2.0 is a Medicare claims data API

FedScoop: The U.S. Digital Service team at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has released a new tool that aims to help us learn more from Medicare claims data.

CMS Administrator Seema Verma announced Blue Button 2.0, an application programming interface, or API, during her keynote at HIMSS on Tuesday morning. Blue Button 2.0 is an update to the original Blue Button built by CMS and the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2010.

The original version, as Director of Digital Service at the Department of Health and Human Services Shannon Sartin puts it, was literally a big blue button that Medicare recipients could click to download a PDF or plaintext file of their claims data. This was useful to Medicare beneficiaries, and more than 1 million people availed themselves of this option over the years. But eventually, Sartin said, people began to realize that this information could be useful to third parties like pharmacies, doctors and health care applications as well.

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