The non-partisan and non-profit Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) is amassing billions of medical claims into a database to facilitate research into healthcare costs. Aetna, Humana, and UnitedHealthcare have all contributed claims data to the project, and it is expected that Kaiser Permanente will deliver data as well.
Analyses of medical costs previously relied upon much smaller-scale data repositories. The HCCI database will give researches access to over three billion medical claims from more than 33 million patients. All identifying data has been removed from the claims and no Protected Health Information (PHI) is being shared.
HCCI reported some initial findings from its own analysis of the database, showing a rise in healthcare spending by privately-insured Americans between 2009 and 2010, mainly due to an increase in the prices of healthcare services.
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