Additional Synthetic Beneficiary Data is Available!

[Beneficiary Claims Data API (BCDA) Community]

Hello BCDA Community!

Today we are proud to announce that additional synthetic data for BCDA is now available in the sandbox environment for your testing. This new synthetic data was created in direct response to your feedback. Thank you for helping improve this resource for the BCDA user community.

This is a first release of new synthetic beneficiaries as two sets: one set of 10,000 synthetic beneficiaries and another set of 100 synthetic beneficiaries (which are a subset of the 10,000).

The new synthetic data contains more recent and realistic data including:

1. More recent dates
2. Varied values for NPIs and ZIP Codes (e.g. not all "99999", though NPIs will not tie to real organizations or providers)
3. More realistic patient information (e.g. dates of birth that are in line with most Medicare beneficiaries)
4. More realistic clinical scenarios (e.g. prescriptions and procedures that make sense with given diagnoses)
5. All types of explanation of benefit (EOB) profiles production data can include, which is:
   1. Carrier
   2. Durable Medical Equipment (DME)
   3. Home Health Aide (HHA)
   4. Hospice
   5. Inpatient
   6. Outpatient
   7. Part D Events (PDE)
   8. Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF)

All synthetic beneficiaries in the BCDA synthetic data are under ACO ID A9999. These sets and the previous sets of synthetic data will remain unchanged so that you can rely on them for ongoing testing. That is, you can write tests against these data, and the underlying data will not change later and produce unexpected results.

We plan to gather feedback from the developer community and use that to improve our synthetic data creation process for future releases, with the goal of eventually releasing new data at least quarterly. Future releases will only add new sets of beneficiaries, with enhanced data.

Ready to try out the synthetic data? Read the Synthetic data guide and check out our FAQ. Head over to our sandbox to test the API. 

We are interested in your questions and feedback so that we can improve the synthetic data for future releases! Please email BC...@cms.hhs.gov.