As regular readers may know, we at CCF are big fans of a good dashboard to highlight Medicaid/CHIP data. Well-designed dashboards can pack a wealth of information about a state’s enrollment, quality of care, utilization rates, and managed care performance into a central and easily accessible location. Dashboards also provide transparency, which can help level an uneven playing field where managed care organizations (MCOs) and the state often have access to information that advocates do not. And, when dashboards center disaggregated data, they can help states and advocates measure progress towards health equity goals, target outreach, or track performance for groups of interest like young children. In our opinion, dashboards work best when they are easily accessible on the state Medicaid website, offer interactive features that allow users to filter information, and are updated regularly.

Especially as federal surveys and data sources that we typically rely on have been negatively impacted by the pandemic, access to up-to-date administrative data has become all the more important. Over the past few months, we’ve seen more and more great dashboards, so we’re putting together a Dashboard Library to collect dashboards that tell us something about enrollment and access for children in Medicaid. So far, the library includes the ones we know and love:

• California’s Medi-Cal Children’s Health Dashboard: This dashboard is a great example of disaggregation, providing race and language breakdowns for quarterly enrollment reports, age breakdowns for dental sealants, and regional breakdowns for mental health services.
• Iowa’s Medicaid Managed Care Quarterly Reports: We’ve featured this dashboard before for its wealth of MCO-specific child enrollment and EPSDT screenings data.
• Louisiana’s Medicaid Managed Care Quality Dashboard: This dashboard is great for a zoomed-in look at MCO- and plan-specific performance on Child Core Set metrics over the years.
• Ohio’s Medicaid Demographic and Expenditure dashboards: We love how interactive Ohio’s dashboard is, allowing users to disaggregate enrollment and payment data by race and ethnicity, age, delivery system, and plan.
• Pennsylvania’s Health Equity Analysis Tool (HEAT): The mapping is particularly effective for visualizing inequities, and we love the wide range of social determinants of health and environmental measures alongside Medicaid-specific data.
• Texas’s Health and Human Services Commission Performance Indicator Dashboard: We like the “Plan+Submeasure” view to see how different plans stack up, and the availability of child and maternal health metrics.
• Virginia’s Department of Medical Assistance Services Data dashboards: Some of the dashboards on Virginia’s site are still under construction, but it still houses some of the most comprehensive information we’ve seen, with enrollment, financial, and managed care data.
• Washington’s Maternal and Child Health Dashboard: This innovative dashboard allows users to easily see how performance on quality metrics differ based on race, ethnicity, and even language-preference.

We’ll keep updating the Library and share our findings periodically as we add to it. Have a Medicaid-focused dashboard we’ve missed? Send it to us! See something you like? Talk to your state about replicating it in their own dashboard!