“Advancing health equity is a pillar of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ strategic planning, and that plan depends on data. CMS is building on its understanding of disparities in the health care landscape in order to develop effective solutions.”
“Jeneen Iwugo, deputy director at the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality, said that data analysis is one of CMS’ top priorities.”
“’There’s a tremendous wealth of data that can be used,’ Iwugo said at last month’s AFCEA’s Health IT event. ‘We’ve looked at area deep deprivation indices and other ways to target racial and ethnic data to support not only quality measurement, but also to make sure that we are targeting our quality improvement efforts in the right area.'”
“However, CMS is running up against a catch-22 of sorts: many of the underserved areas that CMS aims to assist have limited resources for data submission. Laura Lanford, CTO at the CMS Innovation Center (CMMI), said one of CMS’ major initiatives is to improve data quality and standardization while ensuring accessibility…”
“Among CMS’ major datasets is the Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System (T-MSIS), a critical data and systems component of the CMS Medicaid and CHIP Business Information Solution (MACBIS). T-MSIS is designed to capture CMS’ role in the healthcare marketplace to help inform program decisions and improvements.”
“’T-MSIS is the place where all the Medicaid data for the nation goes,’ said Karen Shields, deputy director at the Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services. ‘It’s also the system that we use to create readable files for researchers and anyone who has a need for the Medicaid data to access. That system holds the health stories for 82 million people, and they are those who are the most vulnerable in our nation, and the ones who are in need of the most care and access.'”
“Over the past two years CMS has been working to make the T-MSIS data more accessible internally and externally. The CMS is building a Medicaid and CHIP data warehouse and using a data connection system to strengthen the ability to use the data sources. The system is an online application that helps users understand the quality of the dataset they are analyzing and under what circumstances they should rely upon it. Meanwhile, Shields’ department is undergoing a major effort to work with the states to improve data quality…” Read the full article here.
Source: CMS is Depending on Data to Drive Health Equity – By Katherine MacPhail, March 9, 2022. GovCIO.
