Kentucky Medicaid officials present dashboards, say county drilldowns possible but legislative access needs work

The Legislative Research Commission's Health Care Transparency Dashboard Subcommittee heard a detailed briefing from the Cabinet for Health and Family Services on Medicaid dashboards and the datasets that feed them.

"It does not have personal information in it," Commissioner Lisa Lee said of the public-facing dashboards, emphasizing that the views are summary-level and intended to avoid HIPAA violations. Lee walked members through core systems including the MMIS, a partner portal (MPPA) for provider revalidation, a waiver-management system for 1915(c) waivers and a Kentucky long-term-care level-of-care application.

Lee said the dashboards allow county-by-county drilldowns for spend and enrollment, and that the department maintains about 85 managed-care reports that feed analytic views for staff and oversight. "We do have some other data sources that Medicaid doesn't utilize frequently or even at all sometimes. These are housed in our office of health data and analytics," she said, listing EMS data, an AirConnect repository and a social-needs connector tool.

Senator Meredith asked whether legislators could view county-level data for districts. Lee replied that the dashboards can drill to county and member-category levels but that "if you want every legislator to have access to it, then we would have to see what we have to do to make that happen." General Counsel Wesley Duke and other staff warned that federal and state privacy laws require care in expanding access and that technical work would be needed to provision broader legislative access.

The presentation concluded with staff offering to provide lists of research reports from the State University Partnership Program and to work with the subcommittee on prioritizing which dashboard elements should be exposed to policymakers.