Author
Kenley Money
Director, Information Systems Architecture
Contact
ACHI Communications
501-526-2244
jlyon@achi.net
About 290,000 Arkansans, or 12.3% of the adult population, have been diagnosed with diabetes, according to the American Diabetes Association. Diabetes is an especially high-cost disease: Medical expenses are approximately 2.6 times higher for individuals with diabetes than for those without the disease. To aid researchers seeking to understand the health and financial impacts of diabetes, the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement has created the Diabetes Analytic Data Mart, a new resource made possible by the Arkansas Healthcare Transparency Initiative.
The data mart contains information on insurance enrollment and medical and dental healthcare utilization for Arkansans with types 1 and 2 diabetes, with no personally identifiable information included. The data span the years 2016 through 2022 and will enable analysts and researchers to explore subjects including:
- Utilization of medical and pharmacy services and expenditures on these services
- Prevalence, volume, and rates of diabetes
- The impacts of continuous insurance coverage
- Geographic distribution of diabetes
- Changes over time
- Coexisting conditions and complications
- Medication cost impacts
- Adverse outcomes
The data mart is the latest addition to the Arkansas Healthcare Transparency Initiative. Established by Act 1233 of 2015 and expanded in later years by additional legislation, the initiative seeks to provide a unified source of healthcare data to support research, policy and program development, and healthcare transparency.
A key component of the initiative is the Arkansas All-Payer Claims Database, a large-scale database containing medical, pharmacy, and dental insurance claims and insurance enrollment data from most of the state’s public and private payers. The initiative also includes several types of data from the Arkansas Department of Health: vital records, disease registry information, hospital discharges and emergency department utilization records for uninsured Arkansans and those who self-pay, and medical marijuana data. The Arkansas Center for Health Improvement administers the initiative with oversight from the Arkansas Insurance Department. Recent enhancements to the initiative, including the Diabetes Analytic Data Mart and the Mother/Infant Crosswalk, which enables linkage of mother and infant data, have been funded by the Insurance Department through federal grants.
Over the years, the initiative has proven to be an invaluable resource for researchers, serving as the primary data source for studies on topics such as hospital price transparency, disparities in healthcare access, healthcare utilization among low-income populations, and the effectiveness of home visiting programs in improving maternal and child health. Data on Arkansans with diabetes have been available through the initiative since its inception, but the creation of a data asset devoted solely to this topic is intended to simplify and accelerate the efforts of researchers pursuing projects that ultimately could lead to improvements in the treatment and prevention of this chronic disease.
Requests to access the data mart or other data assets of the Healthcare Transparency Initiative can be submitted through ACHI’s website.
