Medicaid administrative data are useful for documenting and understanding variation in Medicaid enrollment and health care use. This workshop delivers an overview of the design of the Medicaid program, describes available research files, and provides insight into how these features affect inference.
Workshop Date: Check back for upcoming workshop dates. If you would like to receive e-mails about future workshops, please join our mailing list. For more information on how to use the data, please see our workshop videos.
Location: Minneapolis, MN
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Why You Should Attend this Workshop
You believe that Medicaid administrative data may answer your research question, and you want to understand the strengths and limitations of the data.
Your team has given you the task of answering a research question using Medicaid administrative data, and you want to understand the underlying structure and how to interpret what you see.
Many of the workshop elements will be easier to assimilate by those with previous experience with the data. However, prior experience is not strictly necessary.
Educational Objectives:
- Understand the general design of the Medicaid program and the implications for research on this population.
- Know how the data migrates from states to the final CMS Medicaid Analytic Extract (MAX) files.
- Understand the structure of the files that compose MAX data and have a general understanding of the variables available in each file type.
- Be aware of some of the data limitations.
- Know where to locate resources and tools to support work with Medicaid data.
- Understand how to use enrollment and claims data to define a study population.
- Be able to generate basic descriptive demographic and utilization information on a Medicaid population including eligibility counts, physician visits, inpatient admissions, and lengths of stay.
- Understand how to use the CDPS and MRx classification systems. The Chronic Illness and Disability Payment System (CDPS) is a diagnostic-based classification system developed to assess risk and adjust capitated payments to health plans enrolling Medicaid beneficiaries. The second system is Medicaid Rx, a risk assessment and adjustment model that uses prescription claims data.
- Be familiar with how Medicaid data in other forms (MSIS, MMIS, state proprietary files) may differ from the CMS MAX data and this impacts potential research questions and which tools and resources are applicable.
- Know the process for requesting data from CMS, including the MAX files.