Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, New York University

One in five New Yorkers is covered by the State’s $54 billion Medicaid system every year. It is an enormous system that serves some of the neediest and sickest patients, and yet data and analytic resources have been insufficient for the task of improving their care.

Outside of a few academic studies and some large-scale program interventions, access to and use of New York State Medicaid data have been historically limited by issues such as restrictions on releasing the data; complexity of the data itself, which makes analysis challenging; and lack of capacity of organizations to conduct rigorous evaluations. To overcome these barriers, NYHealth, in partnership with the New York State Department of Health, awarded the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University (NYU) a grant to establish a statewide Medicaid evaluation consortium to centralize and facilitate the use of Medicaid data.

Under this grant, NYU formed a consortium team that created a centralized resource that made the data available as inexpensively and quickly as possible for a wide range of consortium members, including all major Medicaid providers and health plans. The consortium team obtained data from the State, worked with the State to facilitate data releases that were close to real time, and advised entities using the data on the design of specific evaluations and analyses. The team also processed the complex claims and encounter data, creating user-friendly analytic files for consortium members. Consortium members nominated evaluations or analyses to be conducted, with priority given to projects of widest interest that affect large numbers of Medicaid patients and substantial Medicaid expenditures. Organizations that became members of the consortium were charged a fee that supported the cost of developing the user-friendly files. While the data will be housed at NYU, it is expected that other qualified researchers will have access to the data.