PS1-26: The VDW Demographic and Enrollment Files: Strengths, Issues, and Recommendations for the Future

Abstract

Background/Aims: The VDW Demographic and Enrollment data files contain basic demographic data on all HMO members. These data include details of membership (start and end dates, whether drug coverage was included, type of insurance [Medicare, Medicaid, etc]). Demographic data include birthdate, gender, race/ethnicity. Demographic and enrollment data give the information needed to enumerate and begin describing a potential or actual study population. These data can be combined to give interesting and informative views into the different populations at the participating HMOs. This poster will describe the variations in data validity and completeness between the various HMOs, including age distributions, Medicare/Medicaid enrollment, variations in availability of race/ethnicity data, and recommendations for future improvements. Methods: The VDW Demographic/Enrollment QA committee was formed as part of the new HMORN governance of the VDW. This committee is charged with analyzing the quality of the demographic and enrollment VDW files at the various HMORN health plans. The subcommittee has prepared a list of quality assurance tables, and is in the process of writing VDW programs to produce them. There is an ongoing interest in the ethnic diversity of our combined HMO population and a renewed interest in studying health care disparities. It is important that we can use the race/ethnicity data to describe our populations in appropriate terms. The Quality Assurance subcommittee is developing a set of programs to produce useful population descriptions using different methods to combine and report multiple ethnicities. These reports can provide the information needed in grant proposals, IRB progress reports and for study reports. Results: Our report to the Operations Committee will describe the extent and quality of the VDW Demographic and Enrollment data at the various sites, identifying inconsistencies and making recommendations for changes in the specifications. The proposed poster will highlight our findings. Conclusions: We anticipate that the data are of high quality, however, we do expect to find some limited inconsistencies among health plans. In addition, we anticipate that we will recommend some enhancements to the specifications.