The Kansas Health Policy Authority has awarded a $4 million contract to Thomson-Reuters for the creation of a virtual data warehouse that will allow the authority to examine patterns of health care and costs in the state.
The warehouse, known as the Data Analytic Interface, will include data from the state’s Medicaid Management Information System, the state employees health benefits program, the Kansas Health Insurance Information System and the state workers compensation program. These programs cover about 1 million of the state’s 2.7 million residents.
Information gleaned from the aggregated data will help the authority adopt data-driven health care policies, the authority’s deputy director, Andy Allison, said in a statement.
The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will pay for more than two-thirds of the cost of the three-year contract, according to an announcemtn by the authority. The authority expects the warehouse to be ready for use in about a year.
The authority administers all the programs with the data that will be used. “The breadth and depth of the information contained in these datasets presents an unprecedented opportunity to document, describe, analyze and diagnose the state of health care in Kansas,” Allison told a legislative committee last year. Those efforts, in turn, will influence the agency’s decisions as it purchases health care, he said.
The warehouse will have a user-friendly interface so that a wide range of users inside and outside the authority can obtain data for analysis, Allison said. He said the Data Analytic Interface would “include value-added tools such as disease episode grouper or built-in calculations for quality measures.”
In a separate development, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and the health policy authority have appointed the members of a new E-Health Advisory Council that will help the state government benefit from health information technology. The council will hold its first meeting Sept. 10.
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
