 Hi, my name is Charlie Ornstein, I'm a reporter at ProPublica and today I'm going to talk to you about our brand new app, Treatment Tracker. Treatment Tracker is an interactive experience. You're going to be able to see not only how much your doctor bills Medicare, but what individual services he or she provides and how they compare to their peers. The very first thing you're going to want to do is go to our Treatment Tracker website and enter in your doctor's name. Doctors have similar names and sometimes the same name, so you want to be sure that you're picking the right one. Here I'm going to pick Dr. Smith from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Once you land on his Treatment Tracker page, we're going to tell you several things. We're going to give you information on the services he performs, how he bills Medicare, and how his practice compares to his peers. The first section on the page shows how he compares in broad ways. You'll notice the middle chart shows average services per patient, and this is the average number of services that both he and others in his specialty give to patients. So cardiologists in Louisiana give an average of 4.5 services per patient. Dr. Smith gave 3.7 services per patient, pretty close to average. Let's take a look at somebody who's not so average. Here you'll notice that this provider gave 35.9 services per patient compared to 2.2 for his specialty in state. That makes his provider in the top 10%, and you'll notice that by the red note. Going back to Dr. Smith, you can also see the average amount that he was paid per patient from Medicare. Cardiologists in Louisiana got an average of $248 per patient in 2012. Dr. Smith received $219 per patient. Again, he's pretty average. Going back to our outlier, you'll see that this doctor received $3,824 per patient. By comparison, others in his specialty in state received $105 on average. Going back to Dr. Smith as you move down the page, you'll see a section that looks at office visits. Medicare pays for office visits on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the most costly and most intensive office visit, and 1 being the least costly and least intensive office visit. Going back to our doctor, who is an outlier, you're able to see that he bills for office visits at level 5 97% of the time, while others in his specialty do so 7% of the time. The reason you should care is that you may pay a copayment based on what level of service and the cost of each of your visits, so this could be costing you more money. Going back to Dr. Smith, as you scroll down the page, you'll see a list of his individual services that he gave to Medicare patients in 2012. And you'll see again that many of the services he chose are pretty similar to those of other specialists in his state, and he gave them about the same number of times as they did. Returning again to our outlier doctor, what you'll find is that he's performing services that very few specialists in his state are performing. What I'd want to ask is whether or not these procedures are necessary, and why this doctor is performing services that others aren't. Our app will also give you information about the bigger picture. First, in the middle of each page, you'll see information about a doctor's referral network, that people that their patients see most before or after they see this doctor. Also on the page, you'll see links to our prescriber checkup app. Prescriber checkup is a tool that lets you see which drugs your doctor is prescribing in Medicare's Part D program. And you can use our dollars or docs app to see whether this doctor has received any payments from pharmaceutical companies. Together, these databases can give you a pretty good picture about how your doctor practices medicine and compares to others. So if you're like me and you like things a little wonky, this app also gives you tools to geek out. By clicking on a state from the main home page, you can see the specialists in that state and the top services performed in that state. What that will let you do is compare all of the doctors in a given specialty in the state and find things that look interesting. On the other side of a state page, you can see the top procedures performed in that state. And by clicking on any of those services, it will take you to a page with the top providers for that service in that state. Thanks for taking the time to learn about treatment record. We'd love to hear your thoughts and comments, so drop us an email to checkupatpropublica.org. Happy searching!