Medicaid Working Group (archive)

Medicaid Working Group

As Medicaid plays an increasingly central role in U.S. health care, it will be imperative to conduct national studies to analyze the costs and quality of care delivered to program enrollees and to understand large-scale changes in the prevalence of disease among the Medicaid population. The essential tools needed for these analyses and understanding are the volumes of patient data generated across the country in claims files called Medicaid Analytic eXtract (MAX) files.

Back to Research

CHAS is supporting an interdisciplinary working group of faculty and Fellows to bring to the University of Chicago the most recent Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ MAX files.

The group will be 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 will 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.

Long-term Research Goals of the Medicaid (MAX) Working Group

The group seeks to examine trends in the following areas:

quality of care delivered to pediatric and adult Medicaid beneficiaries in the inpatient, outpatient, and long-term care settings;
health care utilization and expenditures in the Medicaid program;
disease prevalence among Medicaid beneficiaries.