Benchmarking boon: tapping publicly available data to improve performance.

Publicly available data can help hospitals benchmark their experience against that of their peers to identify unexpected variations and potential opportunities for improvement. Medicare Provider Analysis and Review data and Medicare cost report data can be used to analyze a hospital's experience by medical service area and by Medicare-severity-adjusted DRG. Such an analysis provides an excellent first step for more in-depth analysis that can hone in on potential problem areas, such as inaccurate documentation or coding.