The federal government recently released payment data for Medicare reimbursements, which include names and addresses for payment recipients, along with what type of service was given. Exciting!

So I plunged in to see where medicare reimbursements were going within the five boroughs. Upon browsing the data, I stumbled upon an interesting reimbursement category: Massage Therapy. This is a more of a non-traditional approach to medicine, so I decided to dig in a bit more.

I found that roughly 5 million dollars were reimbursed for “Massage Therapy” in NYC in 2012. But more interestingly, I noticed that 25% of the money was going to just one zip code, 11229, or Brighton Beach. Furthermore, about 50% of of all massage therapy reimbursements were going to providers in 6 adjacent zip codes all around Brighton Beach. (including 11230,11235,11214,11223,11204).

Moreover, while the citywide average for repeat office visits for massage therapy was 8 times, in Brighton Beach’s 11229, that number was over 17. This suggests that the higher reimbursements rates are related to both more patients and more repeat treatments.

Mapping this out draws a clearer picture. Each circle below represents a recipient of medicare reimbursements for Massage Therapy. Larger circles represent higher payment. If you click on one, you can see the individual name of each provider, as well as the amount reimbursed and the address.

If you zoom in to the southern part of Brooklyn, you can see the clustering of providers getting reimbursed. The largest circle belongs to Wael Bakry, who has been written about previously. But this map shows that this is not just a story about a single provider, but rather dozens of them in the area.

If we map out payments summed by Zip Code, a few other Massage Therapy hotspots emerge: Flushing (11354) and Bayside (11361). But neither of those compare in volume to Brighton Beach.

So what is the link? Maybe it’s all the pedicab drivers that need massages after there hard days work? Or maybe the folks in and around Brighton Beach might well be on to something. I suppose the next step is to look at reimbursements for all sorts of other physical ailments to see if all of those massages are improving health outcomes in the long run!

And in all of this, perhaps the most surprising thing is that according to Medicare, “Medicare doesn’t cover massage therapy.” Confused? Me too. I’m off to get a massage.

-Maps created in QGIS, and exported to cartodb for dynamic web viewing.

-Analysis done in Python (pandas)

-Geocoding done with Google, using GeoPy