This year marks a decade since the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement began to collect data under the Arkansas Healthcare Transparency Initiative (HTI), Arkansas’s primary, unified source for health data. Over the past 10 years, the initiative has been an invaluable resource for healthcare leaders, researchers, and policymakers seeking better insight into health and health care in Arkansas.
Transforming Health Data Into Useful Information
In 2015, the Arkansas General Assembly recognized the need for a more transparent healthcare system. Legislators authorized a new resource that would integrate health data from multiple sources and make it possible to transform that data into useful information to support consumer choice, health policy decisions, health research, quality improvement initiatives, and evaluation of health-related programs. The HTI was created under Act 1233 of 2015, the Arkansas Healthcare Transparency Initiative Act, championed by then-Sen. David Sanders. The law placed the HTI under the authority of the Arkansas Insurance Department and designated ACHI to administer the infrastructure for the initiative. Data collection began the following year.
A core component of the initiative is the Arkansas All-Payer Claims Database (APCD), a central repository for medical, pharmacy, and dental health insurance claims data and provider and enrollment files submitted by public programs and private insurers in the state. The Arkansas APCD includes claims data for between 80% and 85% of all Arkansans with some type of healthcare coverage.
“When you visit your doctor, the clinic submits a claim to your insurer to get paid for the services provided to you. That claim for payment ultimately gets submitted to the APCD in an anonymized way that protects the identity of the patient but allows for analysis of an individual’s use of services and the associated costs over time,” said Craig Wilson, ACHI’s president and CEO. “When you put thousands of records together, you can generate real insight into the health and healthcare needs of our communities.”
About half of states have established or are developing APCDs, but the Arkansas APCD is only one part of the HTI. Over the years, the General Assembly has authorized expansions of the HTI to include other types of data, including birth and death records, hospital discharge and emergency department utilization records for the uninsured, cancer registry data, medical marijuana cardholder data, Arkansas State Police crash records, and workers’ compensation data…