MHQP’s Courtemanche Co-Authors Study on Feasibility of Quality and Cost Comparisons Across States Using Local Claims Data

(May 2019)

Jim Courtemanche, MHQP’s Vice President of Programs and Analytics, has co-authored an important article featured in The American Journal of Managed Care in May 2019. The manuscript, Producing Comparable Cost and Quality Results from All-Payers Claims Databases, was developed in collaboration with the Network for Regional Healthcare Improvement (NRHI), the Center for Improving Value in Health Care (CIVHC) in Colorado, and Comagine Health (formerly HealthInsight) in Utah and Oregon, in partnership with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and Harvard University in the Comparative Health System Performance Initiative Study funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

The study demonstrates the feasibility of assessing healthcare performance within and across states using rich data sources and is part of a larger project to identify the effect of health systems on economic and clinical performance.

A key accomplishment was the development of a Uniform Data Structure (UDS) file format that can be scaled across populations, measures, and research dimensions to provide a consistent method to produce comparable findings across regions. The work described in this paper is a subset of projects being facilitated through the NBER Center of Excellence.

“We were pleased to participate in this important research project with other regional health collaboratives and NRHI,” said Courtemanche. “The findings reinforce both the power and the benefits that a collaborative approach can bring to challenging health issues such as creating a standard approach to measurement.”

The full manuscript can be viewed in the May 2019 issue of The American Journal of Managed Care: https://www.ajmc.com/journals/issue/2019/2019-vol25-n5/producing-comparable-cost-and-quality-results-from-allpayer-claims-databases