CMS Won't Let Researchers Study Substance Abuse

In an unusual move, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in 2013 began quietly deleting substance use disorder data from the files they share with researchers. Up until that point, CMS had freely allowed researchers to use the data to track health care procedures related to substance use across millions of patients.

So why start suppressing the data? After researchers Austin Frakt and Nicholas Bagley broke the story, CMS said it was a matter of patient privacy and, citing a long-overlooked 1987 rule, concluded that researchers needed to start obtaining individual consent.