Five States Awarded Disability and Health Program Value Opportunity through AUCD-CDC Partnership

January 30, 2015

AUCD is partnering with CDC's National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities to subcontract with 5 states to access Medicaid data and perform analyses to enhance understanding of the impact and value of state-based Disability and Health Grantee efforts. People with disabilities insured by Medicaid comprised 15% of the Medicaid population (62.7 million people) and accounted for 42% of total Medicaid expenditures ($263.4 billion) in 2009. While state level data are available that describes people with disabilities, the definition of disability employed is general (i.e. based on a functional definition) and does not allow for the identification of people with specific types of disability (e.g. limb loss, autism, cerebral  palsy) or their type(s) of insurance coverage (e.g. Medicaid). This lack of disability-specific data hinders opportunities to characterize the populations of interest, identify specific health issues among those populations, and track progress of health and wellness improvement by primary disabling condition. The goals of the project are to:

• identify people with intellectual disability covered by Medicaid in a state
• characterize the leading health issues that these Medicaid recipients living with the aforementioned conditions experience
• identify opportunities to improve the health and wellness of Medicaid recipients living with the aforementioned conditions

Algorithms for analysis and technical assistance will be provided through AUCD's cooperative agreement with CDC's Office for State, Tribal, Local and Territorial Support; the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities; and a subcontract with the University of South Carolina.  The five states collaborating on this effort are Massachusetts, Iowa, Illinois, Delaware, and New York.

For more information on this project, contact Adriane Griffen, AUCD's Director of Public Health.