By Aubrianna Osorio and Emma Ford, CCF Graduate Research Intern

Wondering how many children with Medicaid/CHIP coverage are getting their recommended well-care visits or developmental screenings? What about follow-ups for new medications, or dental sealants? Curious about how many women had a low-risk Cesarean section delivery or a prenatal or postpartum visit? Then check out the newly updated quality data on our State Data Hub!

To track quality of care, CMS publishes the Child Core Set, which provides data on the share of children with Medicaid/CHIP coverage in each state who receive certain services (like immunizations) or have certain health outcomes (like low birth weight) over the course of the previous fiscal year. The measures are grouped into domains: Primary Care Access and Preventive Care, Care of Acute and Chronic Conditions, Behavioral Health Care, Dental and Oral Services, and Maternal and Perinatal Health. (State reporting was voluntary for the most recent FY 2022 data but became mandatory in 2024.)

If you were familiar with the FY 2020 data we previously had posted, you’ll notice some important new measures included in the FY 2022 Core Set:

• Well child visits in the first 15-30 months of life, and for children and adolescents ages 3-21
• Influenza and Combination 10 immunizations by a child’s second birthday
• Follow-up after emergency department visits for alcohol and other drug abuse or dependence (ages 13-17), and follow-up after emergency department visits and hospitalizations for mental illness/intentional self-harm (ages 6-17)
• Oral evaluation and dental services (up to age 20), topical fluoride (up to age 20), and sealants on at least one and on all four first permanent molars
• Low-risk Cesarean deliveries

Flip through the charts below for an overview on how states are doing on these new measures, or head over to the State Data Hub to see data for all the measures your state reports. For a deeper dive on the quality metrics, check out our Medicaid Learning Lab webinar on that topic.

Some tips and tricks for reading and interpreting this quality data:

• The data are based on quartiles… Each state’s performance is ranked from best to worst and then grouped into four buckets: the worst 25%, the group between the 25^th percentile and the median (the halfway point), the group between the median and the 75^th percentile, and the best 25%. The number of stars a state has for each measure corresponds to the quartile it falls in (states in the bottom have 1 star, states in the top have 4).
• …but the star ranking isn’t everything. Doing well compared to other states is different than actually doing a good job of getting children the services they need. For example, a state might receive four stars for immunization rates when compared to the other states; however, if only half of the children in that state get immunized, there could still be room for improvement. Take both the star ranking and the state’s performance rate into account!
• Not all states report all measures (yet). This means that these data might not be very helpful if your state doesn’t report many measures (measures not reported are marked “NR” for “Not Reported” or “DS” for “Data Suppressed”). It also means that the sample size varies from measure to measure, and states aren’t always compared to the rest of the country .
• Switch between Graph or Table view depending on your needs!