Today, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), updated certain research-ready Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System (T-MSIS) data files, which provides for a more robust and evolving collection of Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) data. T-MSIS data is the most current and complete Medicaid and CHIP data resource available and builds upon years of CMS’ work toward strengthening data availability for these coverage programs that serve more than 75 million low-income Americans.
The data CMS released through T-MSIS provides timely and accurate information on utilization and spending under Medicaid and CHIP, and are needed to enable research and analysis to improve quality of care, assess beneficiary care costs and enrollment, improve program integrity and monitor performance. The data is utilized by researchers, entrepreneurs, Congress, oversight agencies and others.
“The Trump Administration has repeatedly taken historic action to provide transparency into the Medicaid program, which for too long has been shrouded in mystery,” said CMS Administrator Seema Verma. “T-MSIS can be a treasure trove of information to researchers looking to analyze Medicaid-related trends. Today’s update represents the continuation of President Trump’s long-running commitment to transparency in healthcare.”
Today’s release includes an update to T-MSIS data for calendar years 2014 through 2016 to reflect improved state data quality. Currently, T-MSIS information for calendar years 2014 through 2018 is available to the public. Today’s data refresh provides updates to research files for calendar years 2014, 2015 and 2016, used for monitoring program performance and analyzing state and federal payments for services. CMS is also adding updated data quality information for those years to its recently launched Data Quality (DQ) Atlas tool, aninteractive, web-based tool that helps policymakers, analysts, researchers and other stakeholders explore the quality and usability of data files to determine if the data can meet their analytic needs. The Agency is also releasing initial data quality information for calendar year 2019 that will allow researchers to view data quality measures in anticipation of the preliminary data file becoming available in the near future.
The updated research files include more robust claims data from states for these calendar years, which is a significant data quality improvement over the original files that were released in November 2019. Arkansas is now included in the 2016 data, and Puerto Rico is now included in both the 2015 and 2016 data. With the addition of these data, the 2014-2016 research files now contain data from every state and territory who submitted a complete year of data for that timeframe, reflecting increased state data quality.
Today’s announcement is the product of the efforts that CMS and CMS’s state partners have engaged in to improve the quality and completeness of its T-MSIS data. In keeping with that continued effort, CMS has identified 32 priority areas for all states to address as a high priority to improve the quality and completeness of their T-MSIS data. The agency established an ongoing collaboration with states to address these focus areas, and is tracking these as part of the Administrator’s Scorecard that was just updated for 2020 on October 30, 2020.
External researchers can obtain access to this data by submitting a request to the CMS Research Data Assistance Center (ResDAC) and signing a CMS data use agreement containing strict beneficiary privacy and data security requirements. To learn more visit the ResDAC website: https://www.resdac.org/.
To view fact sheet, please visit: https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/fact-sheet-medicaid-and-chip-t-msis-analytic-files-data-release
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