| Health care data allow users to visualize and analyze the intersections between the social determinants of health and health outcomes. Mapping health care data can provide significant added value to an equity atlas but can be extremely difficult due to patient privacy issues and limited availability of medical record information. CLF addressed these challenges by partnering with Oregon Health Care Quality Corporation (Q Corp), which collects, aggregates, and reports on insurance claims data as part of its work to improve health care quality and affordability. |
| Click below for more information about CLF’s partnership with Q Corp and the health care data in Regional Equity Atlas 2.0: |
Q Corp is a nonprofit organization that provides information to health care stakeholders about the quality, utilization, and costs of health care in Oregon. In partnership with its network of stakeholders, Q Corp has developed the most comprehensive administrative claims (insurance billing) database in Oregon, including data from Oregon’s largest commercial health plans, Medicare managed care plans, and Medicaid.
Much of the data that Q Corp collects includes patient-level health data, including street addresses. Q Corp received permission from its data suppliers to use this information to calculate incidence rates. In order to maintain confidentiality, address-level data were aggregated into census tracts or neighborhoods by a third-party data services vendor.
Q Corp’s data were used to map disease rate information in the Regional Equity Atlas 2.0 for diabetes, asthma, and cardiovascular disease, as well as two proxies for access to preventive care—prevalence of well-child visits and use of the emergency department for conditions that could have been treated in primary care.