Sound policy development as well as analysis to inform policy ultimately rests on high-quality data. Thomson Reuters has a distinguished history of developing databases and related tools to support research and analysis on healthcare costs, utilization, and quality.
- Accurate, timely data integrated at a variety of levels — state, hospital, and individual encounter
- Reporting systems for capturing information about service costs and utilization
- Methods for optimizing use of existing data to monitor trends in cost, utilization, and quality of care
Benefits
One of the core strengths of Thomson Reuters is developing standardized healthcare databases. Our expertise includes the design, construction, evaluation, and integration of large-scale health data systems, as well as technical support for users. Thomson Reuters has been the prime contractor on large-scale database development efforts for more than two decades. Most notable are projects for federal clients, including the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS), and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Agency (SAMHSA). Thomson Reuters also has policy makers and data experts at all levels of government and in the private sector through all stages of data management, including data collection, database development, and design of the technical architecture.
Impact
Policy makers and analysts rely on databases created and maintained by Thomson Reuters to monitor trends and conduct analyses of healthcare costs, utilization, and quality. Thomson Reuters databases play a central role in prominent recurring national analyses, including analyses of mental health and substance abuse costs and state-specific profiles of healthcare quality. Health services researchers have produced hundreds of articles in peer-reviewed journals using data from databases created by Thomson Reuters.
Project Highlights
HCUP Databases. The Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) is a collection of healthcare databases and related software tools and products developed through a Federal-State-Industry partnership and sponsored by AHRQ. Thomson Reuters has been the prime contractor for building the HCUP databases for the past 25 years. Thomson Reuters works with AHRQ and State partners to integrate a core set of clinical and nonclinical information found in a typical discharge abstracts, including all-listed diagnoses and procedures, discharge status, patient demographics, and charges. The information is translated into a uniform format to enable national trend analyses and comparisons across regions and States. Thomson Reuters has also developed supporting software tools, such as program for converting charges to costs, that help analysts use HCUP for research.
Integrated Mental Health and Substance Abuse Databases. Public agencies are the largest funder of mental health and substance abuse (MH/SA) services. Typically these services are fragmented across multiple payers, making it difficult for States to track patients, costs, and service utilization across the their MH/SA system. SAMHSA asked Thomson Reuters to help states integrate disparate sources of data on MH/SA services. Thomson Reuters worked with three selected states to integrate information from three types of state organizations: state Medicaid programs, state MH Agencies, and state substance abuse agencies. The resulting databases link service record information on MH/SA treatment utilization for each person into a uniform database. Because the IDB combines information for individuals who receive services under multiple public programs, the IDB thus provides a more complete picture of the MH/SA clients seen in more than one part of the state-supported MH/SA treatment system. A second phase of this work, also led by Thomson Reuters, is helping the same states use the integrated data and is also assisting a larger group of States to integrate their MH/SA data.