ABSTRACT: In 2016, various medical researchers conducted a study comparing health care use and spending of Medicaid enrollees serviced at health centers versus those seen at non-health centers. The research study found that health centers provide a cost-efficient setting for Medicaid recipients given that patients who received care at health centers had lower spending than did non-health center patients. The new proposed study aims to update analyses on these findings by using more recent data and a larger sample of states. An updated study can provide additional information on the value of health centers as well as extend analyses to other measures of outpatient quality of care like that of ambulatory care admissions in primary care settings.

Associated Authors: Dr. Marshall Chin, Richard Parrillo Family Professor of Healthcare Ethics; Dr. Elbert Huang, Professor of Medicine at The University of Chicago Department of Medicine; Dr. Tamara Konetzka, Professor of Health Services Research at the Department of Public Health Sciences; Robert Nocon, Senior Health Services Researcher at the Chicago Center for Diabetes Translation Research.

 

 

The Medicaid Working Group at the University of Chicago is among the first to use a national panel of MAX files to assess program-wide performance and disease prevalence both at a single point in time and over several years. The working group’s findings have and will continue to allow state Medicaid programs and federal policymakers to understand how shifts in the external policy environment are impacting the care of Medicaid beneficiaries, and will additionally facilitate efforts to identify opportunities to improve the coordination of resources for the growing Medicaid population.