The mission of the Louisiana Health Care Quality Forum (the Quality Forum) is to lead collaborative, evidence based initiatives to improve the health of Louisiana citizens. Central to the ability of the Quality Forum to achieve its mission is the availability and use of objective data on the quality, cost and outcomes produced by our state’s health care delivery system, as well as the current status of the health of our citizenry.
During this time of rebuilding our health care infrastructure, and while state government is committed to advancing reforms, we have an unprecedented opportunity to make real change and develop a value-driven health care system for Louisiana. Creating such a system requires identifying opportunities for improving our poor standing in both cost and quality of health care delivery and also for avoiding unnecessary or inappropriate care.
The Quality Forum hopes that the data available to the public through the Quality Forum Quality Measurement Analysis Portal or Quality MAP will help identify targeted areas for improvement and lead to the development of focused recommendations, programs and demonstration projects. This will dramatically facilitate the improvements in both the cost and quality of care in Louisiana.
Who created the data warehouse?
Health Dialog created the data warehouse by aggregating the 2005 data from the different payers, and conducted analyses that provide the foundation for the data tables found on this website. A primary finding from these analyses is that significant geographic variation existed in Louisiana’s health care quality and delivery prior to the hurricanes (for more information, see Health Dialog’s 2007 report here). Health Dialog will continue to support the Quality Forum through the provision of data sets to the Quality Forum and ongoing maintenance, updates and analyses of the data warehouse.
The data warehouse contains 2005 claims data from the following sources:
- Complete Medicare & Medicaid eligibility files (uniquely identified and matched dual-eligibles)
- 977,000 Medicaid beneficiaries
- 584,000 Medicare beneficiaries
- 100,000 Dual-eligibles
- Private/BCBSLA data fully-insured book of business (591,000 members)
- Additional data*
- LSU-HCSD uninsured encounter data
- Louisiana Hospital Association Discharge Database
- Data warehouse represents 60% of the insured population in 2005 prior to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita (the total state population in 2005 was 4.5 million)
Our intent is to continually update the data warehouse with current and broader sources. We expect that this website will provide the foundation for permanent, on-going quality monitoring and improvement efforts in Louisiana. Furthermore, we hope that it will promote transparency, incentivize data provision and exchange, and provide baseline data against which the effectiveness of future system changes can be assessed.
We invite you to use our data warehouse for customized research and develop you own analyses. Please go to our
data tools section to begin the process.
*The LSU or LHA data were not used in creating the pivot table, despite the fact that the data were contributed to the warehouse due to aggregation issues.
