A Health Care Claims Data Mart: Construction and Exploitation

Health care claims data are complicated animals. The eccentricities of this data include differences in the types of claims files and the services which populate those files, variations in the type of providers who service the population and the information needed about each type of provider, and finally, the actual populations of health care recipients and all of their individual specifications. Being able to sort through all of this data (and there is usually a lot of it!) and answers queries from insurers, providers, analysts, etc., and other people within your organization can be a real challenge. In the past, the solution was to have people submit requests for one or more programmers to extract data and run analyses. The problem was twofold: programmers were overwhelmed with requests, and worse, the data and/or analyses requested were not the correct solution to the problem. This paper will highlight how this challenge was met through the development of a Data Mart. This includes the steps taken in the design of the Mart, its base tables and MDDBs (MultiDimensional DataBase), the definition of SAS/EIS objects that can exploit MDDBs, and other specific customizations that were developed to allow one organization, the UMBC Center for Health Program Development and Management (CHPDM), to address these data access issues.