This dataset is ProPublica's version of Medicare Part B data. It includes information on payments to individual doctors and other health professionals serving more than 33 million seniors and disabled individuals in its Part B program. Part B covers services as varied as office visits, ambulance mileage, lab tests, and the doctor’s fee for open-heart surgery. We use it to publish our online lookup tool, Treatment Tracker.

This is the data from 2014. Our cleaned, aggregated version of this data includes two tables:

• Providers: a summary table of the total number of patients treated by each provider in Medicare's Part B program and the total amount paid, among other things; and
• Treatments: for each provider who received payments under Part B, our treatment-level data includes the number of times a service was performed, the number of patients treated, and the number of unique patient visits during which each service was performed; as well as detailed information about allowed, total, and average payments for the services provided.

Please note that the data does not include Medicare Advantage plans, which are the health plans Medicare beneficiaries can choose in place of the traditional program. (These programs are more popular in some parts of the country than others.) Nor does it include services delivered to patients with other coverage, such as private health insurance or Medicaid.

The Medicare Part B data captures both medical services as well as drugs dispensed in a facility or a physician's office. Because doctors have to purchase drugs, and they can be expensive, CMS specifically denotes payments relating to drugs and those relating to medical services. Those distinctions are noted in both files.

Note: The sample provided here includes documentation for data from 2015 and sample data from 2014. Both are representative of the data from all three available years: 2013, 2014, and 2015. See all years available here.