Aubriana Osorio and Emma Ford, CCF Graduate Research Interns
Curious about how many children on Medicaid/CHIP receive recommended physical exams and developmental tests? What about follow-up for new medications or dental sealants? How many? Want to know if a woman gave birth by low-risk C-section or had a prenatal and postnatal visit? Then check out our state data hub for newly updated, high-quality data.
To track quality of care, CMS publishes the Child Core Set. It provides data on the percentage of children in each state who are covered by Medicaid/CHIP, receive certain services (such as immunizations), or have certain health outcomes (such as low birth weight). To do. Previous year's course. Measures are grouped into the areas of primary care access and preventive care, acute and chronic disease care, behavioral health, dental and oral services, and maternal and perinatal health. (Country reporting was voluntary for the most recent 2022 data, but became mandatory in 2024.)
If you are familiar with the 2020 data we previously posted, you will notice that the 2022 base set includes some important new metrics.
- Children and adolescents between the ages of 15 and 30 months and ages 3 to 21 visit.
- Get 10 influenza and combination vaccines immunized by your child's 2nd birthday
- Follow-up after emergency department visits for alcohol and other drug abuse or dependence (ages 13-17); Follow-up after emergency department visits and hospitalizations for mental illness and 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 all four first permanent molars
- Low-risk caesarean delivery
You can flip through the graphs below for an overview of how each state is approaching these new measures, or visit the state data hub to see data for all measures reported by states. If you would like to learn more about quality metrics, check out the Medicaid Learning Lab webinar on the topic.
Here are some tips and tricks for reading and interpreting this high-quality data.
- Data is based on quartiles… Each state’s performance is ranked from best to worst and grouped into four buckets. The worst 25%, the group between 25%.th Percentile and median (midpoint), groups between median and 75th percentile, and the highest 25%. The number of stars for each major state corresponds to the quartile it falls in (lower states have 1 star, higher states have 4 stars).
- …But star rankings aren’t everything. It's one thing to say we're doing well compared to other states, but it's another thing to actually do well in providing the services our children need. For example, a state may score four stars for vaccination rates compared to other states. However, even if only half of a state's children are vaccinated, there may still be room for improvement. Consider both star rankings and state performance rates.
- Not all states are reporting all measures (yet). This means that these data may not be very useful if your state does not report many measures (measures that are not reported will be marked with an “NR” for “not reported”). ” or “DS” for “Data Suppression”). This also means that sample sizes vary from measurement to measurement and states are not always compared to other regions of the country.
- Switch between graph or table view According to your needs!
