Health Analytics Program

In order to support the healthcare analytics, research, and evaluation needs of the Hawaii State Departments of Human Services, Budget and Finance, Health, Commerce and Consumer Affairs, and the University of Hawaii; and specifically addressing the needs of the State of Hawaii’s Medicaid (Med-QUEST Division), Employee Union Trust Fund (EUTF), and Medicare (Executive Office on Aging) programs; and in close partnership with the State Health Planning and Development Agency and the State of Hawaii’s Enterprise Technology Services, a series of public sector and legislative partners have contributed resources and their respective strengths towards creating the Health Analytics Program (HAP). 

The Health Analytics Program (HAP) is a very large publicly-funded healthcare data initiative that strives to answer key healthcare questions relevant to the State of Hawaii, thereby providing data to inform data-driven decision making across healthcare programs that serve the citizens of Hawaii.

At its heart, the program aims to collect and integrate:

• administrative healthcare claims, clinical, quality, actuarial and other contextual data; 

• simplify and streamline analytics by grouping healthcare claims into easily analyzable constructs (e.g. claims tied to Emergency Department visits, or behavioral health claims); 

• contextualizing the data to Hawaii’s needs geographically and culturally (e.g. grouping by Hawaii-specific race groupings) and programmatically (e.g. defining programs as they are operationalized within Hawaii’s healthcare milieu); 

• and co-locate the data with a number of advanced analytic tools that can be used to run sophisticated data models.  

Plans are also underway to adequately document, govern and oversee the use of the data.

Work on the Health Analytics Program is being led by the Med-QUEST Health Analytics Office and the Social Science Research Institute (SSRI), Telecommunications and Social Informatics Program (TASI) / Pacific Health Informatics Data Center (PHIDC). SSRI, home of the Health Policy Initiative, conducts and supports interdisciplinary, applied research that addresses critical social, behavioral, economic, and environmental problems primarily in Hawaiʻi and the Asia Pacific region.

In order to build a Health Analytics Program that takes your needs into consideration, we will be reaching out to you to better understand your data and analytic needs, how you currently use data for your work, and how you may be able to use data in the future.

• • • We want to understand how you use data (e.g. reporting, compliance reviews, program planning, operations, etc.) and where you struggle to obtain the data you need in the way you want to see it. 

    • We also want to know the kinds of reports you need (e.g. number of individuals enrolled, types of services provided, prevalence of certain diseases)

    • We would love to understand the types of analyses you’d like to see (e.g. trend reports, utilization reports, predictive models, comparative reports, evaluations of programs)

    • We also want to understand how you like to see data for different needs (tables, charts, infographics, contextual reports, dashboards, maps)

    • Any other ways in which we can support your work

As we continue to build the Health Analytics Program, we will think about and prioritize our work to be able to support you.  Not everything may be do-able, and not everything may be completed quickly or immediately, but we strive to try to build a program that you’ll like.

For questions, please contact Jack Barile at barile@hawaii.edu.

In 2013, the State of Hawaii received a federal grant to form the State’s first All Payer Claims Database (APCD).  An APCD typically encompasses the claims data of all residents of a given state; and as such would be the state’s largest repository of healthcare data and is an enormous undertaking from multiple perspectives: IT (Systems), data governance (data security, privacy, access controls, etc.), data integration (quality, master person indexing), and data analytics (analytics needs and capabilities).  Given the magnitude of the effort and infrastructure needed, key agencies across the State partnered to discuss the policy and strategy necessary to establish such a program for the state.  As expected, the work began with policy: In 2016, Act 139 was passed that established DOH SHPDA as the agency with the authority to request healthcare data, and UH as the designee to receive the data on behalf of SHPDA.  Simultaneously, a steering committee consisting of several state agencies, including the DOH, DOH SHPDA, DHS (MQD), ETS, B&F (including EUTF), DCCA, and UH, was formed to oversee this effort.  Currently, the law mandates that Medicare, Medicaid, and EUTF data shall be submitted, and additional privately-insured health insurance data may be submitted to the APCD.  In 2018, Act 55 was passed that authorized DHS to create a health analytics program and positions within MQD that would help build the APCD.  In 2021, a newly created Health Analytics Office within MQD applied for and obtained funding to create the Health Analytics Program (HAP) that will integrate several types of Medicaid data (including clinical and contextual data), and additionally incorporate the Medicare and EUTF datasets.