This is a proposal to explore the possibility of using for research purposes the data now routinely collected for administration of the Tennessee Medicaid Program. The current data system which was designed for operational and administrative use has been under development for approximately 4 years and provides routinely required expenditure and surveillance reports. These data have never been exploited for health services research purposes. The objective of the activity proposed here is to restructure files for increased flexibility and efficiency of retrieval. The long term goal is to produce data for omnibus health services investigation. Three specific subprojects are proposed as specimen activities utilizing the reformated data. If properly organized these data have extremely high potential as sources of valuable information on (1) costs of specific illnesses, and (2) drug prescription habits of providers and use habits of ambulatory recipients. In addition to economic research on relative costs by diagnostic category this research activity could promote specific directed health care re-education for providers whose profiles indicate that certain kinds of Medicaid patients would be better served by changes in management.
NIH ExPorter
NIH ExPorter