The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) offers researchers and other health care professionals a broad range of quantitative information on their programs, from estimates of future Medicare and Medicaid spending to enrollment, spending, and claims data, and a broad range of consumer research to help its partners and staff. CMS also conducts demonstration projects to explore alternative policies of health care coverage and delivery. National health expenditure data not specific to the Medicare or Medicaid programs are also included.

There are four tiers of data access available to researchers through CMS:

• De-identified data which can be accessed at no cost via the CMS Data Navigator
• Non-Identifiable Data Files which may be requested for a fee and do not require completion of a Data Use Agreement
• Limited Data Set (LDS) Files which may be requested for a fee and includes individual health information but excludes specified direct identifiers as outlined by HIPAA. A signed Data Use Agreement is required.
• Identifiable Data Files (IDF) which are available to specific types of stakeholders and may be requested for a fee. These files include protected health information and/or personally identifiable information. IDF applications must include a research protocol and signed Data Use Agreement (DUA), and are reviewed by CMS’s Privacy Board.

Subsets of CMS data can be viewed in interactive visualizations or dashboards that are organized by topic. Users may use these tools to filter for variables and indicators of interest, then export the underlying data as as CSV files. Topics that are currently covered by these tools include: medicare enrollment, disparities and social determinants of health, Medicaid opioid prescribing rates, market saturation and utilization at the state and county levels, and the prevalence of 18 chronic conditions among beneficiaries enrolled in Medicare fee-for-service at the state and county levels.