Summit County was one of the highest cost of health insurance in the country. Making informed decisions requires context and valid data. Without effective data transparency, stakeholders cannot be held accountable. Articles in Denver Post provide links to data resources such as CIVHC and Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). This Health Data Portal hopes to provide data transparency resources for a variety of stakeholders, including journalists. See these articles:

• In Denver Post, by John Ingold: Consider option for Buying into Medicaid
• In Denver Post, by Electa Draper: Mountain Counties Highest Cost in USA
• In Denver Post, by John Ingold: Is Medicaid Gobbling up Colorado's Budget
• By Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF): Most Expensive Regions in USA for Cost of Health Insurance

The reason for this section is to show how data is used in articles to inform the public, but in the absence of credible data references like those below, policy makers are either frustrated by conflicting and invalid data, or their policies will be ineffective or counter-productive.

• Data is more effective when metrics of all counties in the state are available in one document, with quintiles (not just averages).
• Data is more effective when metrics are available in monthly or annual trends, within the context of quintiles.
• The use of 80/20 quint iles identifies the high and low metrics, which can be summarized as an overall index of performance.
• Metadata can provide clarity, such as distinguishing performance by different payers eg Medicaid, Private and Medicare.
• Pivot tables in Excel format provide an opportunity to give users access to data sets with many Excel features.

The articles above show a need for data below, in pdf format, that have been extracted from data downloaded from CIVHC. Data by region is less useful than county data because regions have no authoritative management. Local Health Agencies should avail themselves of the Excel tables here, to see the extracts of their own respective counties. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) should encourage the development of data portals like this one, including the data sets at CoHID (Colorado Health Information Data).

For comparison of Summit to other Counties with metrics of the All Payer Claims Database, go to the CIVHC folder.

US News and World Report reports on all 3,000 counties in the USA (without data sets). See Summit County , #26 overall ranking.

Colorado Health Foundation in partnership with Colorado Health Institute has developed the Colorado Health Report Card, Snapshots of their metrics are available in pdf format (no hyperlinks or data sets). See Summit County.