Privacy or transparency: Maryland psychiatrists speculate on Medicare payments and their accessibility to the public

Finally, and as a bit of a humorous aside, having the data available does enable some interesting statistical analysis. One day after the data went public, Brian Reid published an article on the widely read medical blog KevinMD. In "Doctors who tweet aren’t ones who bill Medicare for millions," Mr. Reid said,"First, we created a list of doctors who appeared both in the dataset of Medicare providers and our MDigitalLife database of verified doctors in the United States with Twitter handles: 8,000 doctors who both used Twitter and received Medicare payments. We compared that group to the top 14,000 or so providers in the Medicare dataset (every single person who received $500,000 or more from the Medicare). There wasn't a lot of overlap. Only 230 docs made both the top-tweeter and the top-biller list. And among the real outliers – the top 1,000 recipients of Medicare dollars – only 13 were on Twitter, with a measly median follower count of 112. What’s more, there was an inverse association between Twitter followers and money received from Medicare."

Typically, I might end an article by asking readers to follow me on Twitter, but today I think I'll opt for a shot at higher reimbursement.

Dr. Miller is a coauthor of "Shrink Rap: Three Psychiatrists Explain Their Work" (Baltimore: the Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).