Assessment of Comprehensiveness of Medicare Part B Provider-Level Datasets within Dermatology

Publicly-available provider-level Medicare Part B datasets have been increasingly utilized for health services research in dermatology. Despite offering detailed insights, an important limitation of these datasets is suppression of services performed for < 11 Medicare beneficiaries at the level of each provider. This longitudinal review assesses the magnitude of this limitation by comparing service counts in provider-level Medicare datasets to those in aggregate datasets, ultimately identifying a concordance rate of 94.3% for dermatology services. However, facility-based visits (52.5%), inpatient evaluation & management visits (59.7%), phototherapy (62.9%), incision & drainage (61.1%), and nail procedures (38.0%) were less well represented in the provider-level datasets. Provider-level datasets are most suitable for assessing dermatology services in aggregate and among specific high-volume procedure groups but alternative datasets should be considered when investigating inpatient services, facility-based services (more common in certain states), or rarely-performed procedures.