Medicare Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF) Transparency Data (CY2013)

On March 9, 2016, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released a new dataset, the Skilled Nursing Facility Utilization and Payment Public Use File (SNF PUF).  This data set, which is part of CMS’s Medicare Provider Utilization and Payment Data sets, details information on services provided to Medicare beneficiaries by skilled nursing facilities.  The new data include information on 15,055 skilled nursing facilities, over 2.5 million stays, and almost $27 billion in Medicare payments for 2013.  The data is posted on the CMS website here.

The data set identifies individual SNFs using their six-digit identification number.  Services furnished by these SNFs are grouped according to resource utilization groups (RUGs). For each SNF and RUG, the data set has the total number of stays and days provided, number of beneficiaries served, the SNF’s total and average charges, the total and average allowed amounts, the total and average Medicare payments, and the total and average Medicare standardized payments.*   The data set does not contain any individually identifiable information about Medicare beneficiaries. To further protect the privacy of Medicare beneficiaries, any aggregated records which are derived from ten or fewer beneficiaries are excluded from the SNF PUF.

To access the data, click here. Read all of CMS' fact sheet about the data here. 

CMS has been releasing data on various providers under the banner of “transparency.” For example, home health data was released in December 2015. The SNF data contains more specific data on therapy than ever released previously.