Wednesday, December 23, 2020

Very Brief Blog: CMS COVID Data Shows Highest Risk for Black Beneficiaries

CMS has a webpage where it posts beneficiary data about COVID, based on claims data.  CMS notes the data is not designed for epidemiology purposes, for example, racial data is not adjusted for comorbidities.

The homepage for the data is here, the current 12 slide deck is here.

The chart below is normalized "per 100,000" beneficiaries.  Note that the rate of hospitalization for Black patients is about 4X the rate for whites.  

The rate of hospitalization per beneficiary at age 85+ is about triple that for beneficiaries age 65-74.  (Data shown is for information received by October 9).