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November 11, 2014 at 11:44 AM
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) may collect more — and more detailed — performance information from the 16 state-based exchanges during the 2015 open enrollment period.
CMS — an arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) — has revealed the breadth and depth of the exchange information it intends to collect in a paperwork review filing.
The agency is not planning to publish the data itself, but it notes in a discussion of the information collection effort that the responses will not be confidential. That means individuals or companies may be able to get the data either by asking CMS for the data on an informal basis, or by filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
The information collection includes both quarterly reports and weekly reports. CMS has not yet made most of the kind of data obtained through the quarterly reports public, but it’s possible that the quarterly report data from the first open enrollment period, which lasted from Oct. 1, 2013, through mid-April 2014, could be obtained with a FOIA request.
For a look at the data treasures an agent or broker might find in the reports, read on.
1. The weekly reports probably won’t include information about agents and brokers, but they might tell you how many consumers have such a hard time getting through to a call center rep that they hang up.
During the first open enrollment period, some state-based exchanges published information about matters such as website page views, website visits, mail volume, QHP enrollment volume, and call center wait time online.
Those exchanges also have published data on the “abandonment rate” — the percentage of callers who hang up before reaching either an automated assistance service or a live human.
