Using Medicaid and CHIP claims data to support pediatric quality measurement: lessons from 3 centers of excellence in measure development

Objective: We sought to explore the claims data-related issues relevant to quality measure development for Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), illustrating the challenges encountered and solutions developed around 3 distinct performance measure topics: care coordination for children with complex needs, quality of care for high-prevalence conditions, and hospital readmissions.

Methods: Each of 3 centers of excellence presents an example that illustrates the challenges of using claims data for quality measurement.

Results: Our Centers of Excellence in pediatric quality measurement used innovative methods to develop algorithms that use Medicaid claims data to identify children with complex needs; overcome some shortcomings of existing data for measuring quality of care for common conditions such as otitis media; and identify readmissions after hospitalizations for lower respiratory infections.

Conclusions: Our experience constructing quality measure specifications using claims data suggests that it will be challenging to measure key quality of care constructs for Medicaid-insured children at a national level in a timely and consistent way. Without better data to underpin pediatric quality measurement, Medicaid and CHIP will have difficulty using some existing measures for accountability, value-based purchasing, and quality improvement both across states and within states.