Medicaid Working Group

Medicaid Working Group (MWG)

The Medicaid Working Group (MWG) is an interdisciplinary team of University of Chicago health services researchers, economists, political scientists, social workers, and physicians interested in using Medicaid claims data to conduct research to guide policy and practice for low-income and vulnerable populations in the United States. Medicaid is the largest single health care insurer in the United States, insuring more than 20% of the U.S. population (75 million Americans) and affecting the daily practice of clinicians and health care organizations nationwide. Yet the patient insurance claims data available for research remains difficult to access, impeding the creation of effective and innovative policy for low-income populations. With contributory financial and administrative support from CHAS, the MWG continues to purchase nationally represented Medicaid claims data, contributing to a campus data warehouse of Medicaid Analytic eXtract (MAX) files and Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System (T-MSIS) Analytic Files (TAFs), to conduct federally supported research grants and contracts, with several additional start-up projects annually.

The long-term goal of the MWG is to continue facilitating Medicaid data files research access and dissemination to the University of Chicago research community. Analysis of Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) claims data offers a significant opportunity to develop rigorous evidence relevant to healthcare policy and practice as well as to the Medicaid program. With Medicaid data files purchased by funds from CHAS, the Department of Public Health Sciences, and UChicago Medicine, and Medicare data files acquired through support from the Becker Friedman Institute and the Biological Sciences Division, the University of Chicago’s claims data enterprise has resulted in one of the largest repositories of Medicaid and Medicare claims in the country. Potential researchers (both faculty members and graduate students) can explore the process of studying these secure data sets, while protecting associated protected health information (PHI), on the Research Data Assistance Center (RedDAC) website. University of Chicago researchers requesting to utilize the University of Chicago’s Medicaid data sets repository, to reform health care policy and practice for low-income and vulnerable populations in the U.S., can find more information on submitting a Data Use Agreement (DUA), for secure files access, on the website for the Health Policy Data Lab at the Department of Public Health Sciences.