CMS grant funding is going to help the Alabama Medicaid Agency obtain new technology and resources to improve health outcomes for adults covered by the program. The Adult Health Quality Measures Grant announced last December by CMS will increase the agency’s capacity to standardize data collection and able to report data on the quality of healthcare provided to 452,644 adults currently eligible for Alabama Medicaid.
The Agency was initially awarded $ 1 million for the first year and is eligible to receive up to $2 million over the two year period. Grant funds will be used to build a quality unit in the Data Analytics Division that will have the capacity to collect, analyze, and report on data from claims and EHRs, One Health Record®, the State’s HIE, the Real-Time Medical Electronic Data Exchange (RMEDE, and other sources.
According to the Alabama Medicaid Medical Director Dr. Robert Moon, “The Agency currently does not have a focused unit and system to track the CMS Initial Core Set of Adult Health Measures nor the CMS Initial Core set of Child Health Measures,” He added, “At the end of this grant, our goal is to create a data collection system and the analytics for adult health measures that will be robust enough to allow us to eventually collect the child health measures as well.”
Dr Moon reports that Medicaid must move from simply collecting information and data in different programs and activities to analyzing and using the data to drive improved adult health outcomes. His Agency is working towards developing a quality unit in the Data Analytics Division to take the Agency to the next level.
