Since we debuted the Dashboard Library, we’ve been keeping our eyes on state Medicaid agency websites and are pleased to announce that we’ve discovered quite a few more. The dashboards we’ve added to the list vary widely in content and presentation style, ranging from slides to interactive workbooks. Unfortunately, none of the dashboards that we encountered this time around include metrics disaggregated by race/ethnicity or information on EPSDT screens. But, there are some informative visualizations and some very transparent sharers! In conjunction with the recent blog by our colleague Hannah Klukoff on Missouri’s new managed care performance dashboard, we want to spotlight some of our favorite new additions:

• Florida’s “Quality Initiative Dashboard”: This dashboard includes information on maternal and infant health, with data on C-Sections, preterm births, and neonatal abstinence syndrome broken out by hospital and MCO.
• KanCare Dashboard: We love the meter that helps visualize the state’s performance on Child Core Set metrics relative to the national average for each year. The inclusion of MCO-specific information listed underneath the graphics is a start, although it would be great to see these stats trended over time and visualized as well!
• Montana DPHHS Interactive Dashboards: Montana’s series of dashboards include Medicaid enrollment disaggregated by age, data on maternal and infant health (including the share of Medicaid-covered births by county), and well-child visits.
• New Hampshire’s “Design Your Own Report”: This one is less of a dashboard and more of an interactive database, and can require a bit more technical knowledge to find what you’re looking for. But New Hampshire allows you to pull down your own data– including Child Core Set metrics, care coordination data, grievances and appeals, polypharmacy use for children, and much more! And, most data is filterable by different combinations of payer, MCO, and age.
• New Mexico’s “Medicaid Managed Care Organizations and Family & Children” Dashboard: We are intrigued by how this dashboard makes the rather weedy Child Core Set accessible by rephrasing the measures as reader-focused questions. We also appreciate the benchmarking against a regional rate!

We’ve also noticed different types of dashboards that can help advocates and researchers get a handle on how well Medicaid is working for children and families. Without a full-on Dewey Decimal system, we’ve sorted the dashboards into buckets based on what type of information they include: MCO-Specific Dashboards, Quality Dashboards, and Maternal and Infant Health Dashboards. Keeping in mind that the best dashboards are tools of transparency and accountability, we hope that these categories better allow users in both managed care and fee-for-service states to see how much data their state shares, track how health plans and state agencies are doing, and dig deeper into specific topic areas. Quite a few dashboards showcase multiple types of data, from enrollment disaggregated by age to MCO-specific Child Score Set metrics, so we include them in multiple buckets.

Additionally, as our friends at SHADAC recently reminded us, dashboards—especially those with enrollment trends and call center metrics—will play a crucial role in keeping stakeholders informed as the Public Health Emergency unwinds and redeterminations resume. Dashboards that are updated more frequently can help provide timely insights into the pace at which the department is conducting redeterminations and if families are getting the help they need to interpret the notices they are receiving. When the unwinding gets underway, we’ll eagerly await new dashboards monitoring enrollment, redeterminations, and call center metrics. We hope that the dashboards listed now provide some inspiration on what your state can do to convey complex information, promote transparency, and call attention to health equity issues. As always, if you see a great child health dashboard out in the wild, send it our way. We’d love to check it out and feature it in the library!