Issues of Data Capacity and Statistical Quality to Support Health Care Modeling and Microsimulation Efforts

• Activity Number: 202
• Type: Roundtables
• Date/Time: Monday, August 2, 2010 : 12:30 PM to 1:50 PM
• Sponsor: Health Policy Statistics Section
• Author(s): Joel Cohen*+
• Companies: AHRQ
• Keywords: health policy ; data infrastructure ; microsimulation

Abstract

There is a growing demand for timely, high quality and precise estimates of health care parameters at the national and sub-national levels, and associated readily accessible data resources to inform health care policy and practice. Analytic efforts directed to modeling current&future states include economic models projecting health care expenditures and utilization, estimating the impact of changes in financing, coverage, and reimbursement policy, and determining who benefits and who bears the cost of a change in policy. High standards of data quality and statistical integrity for these modeling and microsimulation efforts are needed to ensure policymakers understand the level of uncertainty associated with these model-based estimates. This roundtable discussion will focus on issues of data capacity, statistical quality and evaluations to improve the utility of these efforts.