Medicare data now available for quality research—but who gets access?
H.R. 4331 — Access to Claims Data Act · Filed by John Joyce (R-PA) · 2 cosponsors · Introduced Jul 10, 2025 · Referred to committee
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What it does
This bill requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services to create a process by January 1, 2026, allowing clinical data registries and clinician-led organizations to request Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP claims data to link with clinical outcomes, conduct quality assessments, improve provider performance, and publish research—without requiring them to meet the usual regulatory qualifications. The data would be provided at cost-recovery fees.
Why we flagged it
The bill's core function is to expand access to Medicare/Medicaid claims data for clinical registries and quality-improvement organizations, removing regulatory barriers to support research and provider performance assessment.
What the text implies
- Lowering regulatory barriers for data access may accelerate the consolidation of clinical data into fewer large registry platforms, potentially concentrating market power among dominant data aggregators.
- Deidentified claims data published in research may still allow re-identification of individuals or providers through linkage with other datasets, creating privacy risks not explicitly addressed in the bill.
- Cost-recovery fee structure may favor well-funded registries and exclude smaller, community-based quality-improvement organizations with limited budgets.
Who it affects
Ordinary citizens benefit from expanded access to claims data for quality improvement and research, which can drive better healthcare outcomes and transparency about provider performance. The mechanism is transparent and includes safeguards (deidentification, cost-recovery pricing, clinical purpose limitation).
Who stands to gain
- clinical data registry operators
- health IT vendors supporting registries
- academic medical centers with registry infrastructure
Named in the bill
Secretary of Health and Human Services, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Medicare (Title XVIII), Medicaid (Title XIX), CHIP (Title XXI), qualified clinical data registries, clinician-led clinical data registries, Social Security Act Section 1848, 21st Century Cures Act Section 4005
Where it stands
2 cosponsors: 2 Democrats.
- Jul 10, 2025 — Introduced · Congress.gov: “Introduced in House”
- Jul 10, 2025 — Referred to House Committee on Ways and Means and House Committee on Energy and Commerce · Congress.gov: “Referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and in addition to the Committee on Ways and Means, for a…”
Dates and quoted wording are Congress.gov's action record; the timeline shows status changes, not every procedural step.
Money around this bill
6 lobbying clients named this bill on 7 disclosure filings across 2 quarters, Dec 2025 to Jun 2026. Those filings disclosed $1,002,484 in lobbying spend. A filing names 17 bills on average, so that figure is what each filing reported, not a share belonging to this bill.
More lobbying clients named this bill than 82% of bills with at least one filing.
John Joyce, the sponsor, reported $1,473,437 in PAC receipts in the 2026 cycle.
- The Society of Thoracic Surgeons — $366,153 on 2 filings
- American Academy of Otolaryngology-head and Neck Surgery — $286,331 on 1 filing
- American College of Rheumatology — $180,000 on 1 filing
- Society for Vascular Surgery — $100,000 on 1 filing
- American Association of Neurological Surgeons — $35,000 on 1 filing
Lobbying Disclosure Act filings through Jul 20, 2026. A filing shows who paid to lobby on a bill it names, not what changed.
How this was measured
Analysis — Quorum's AI read the full bill text on Jul 6, 2026; transparency and hidden-provision scores are compared against the median of 16,222 analysed bills.
Status and sponsors — Congress.gov's bill record — actions, committee referrals and cosponsors — loaded nightly. The timeline shows status changes, not every procedural action.
Money — Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings whose specific-issue field names this bill for quarters ending Dec 2025 to Jun 2026. A filing's amount is reported whole beside the median number of bills a filing names; it is never divided across them. PAC receipts are FEC-reported contributions to the sponsor's candidate committee in the 2026 cycle.
As of — lobbying records through Jul 20, 2026 · page rendered 2026-10-20.
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