Frequently Asked Questions

We have two main databases: The Healthcare Facility Databases contains encounter and discharge data from licensed hospitals, emergency rooms and ambulatory surgery centers. The All Payer Claims Database contains data on adjudicated claims for more than 80% of Utah’s non-Medicare population. We also have information about health plan quality and customer satisfaction ratings.

Healthcare Facility Databases:

All licensed ambulatory surgery centers, hospitals, and emergency departments in Utah submit encounter data to the Healthcare Facility Database. This includes billing, medical, and personal information. To learn more, please see view the data use manuals.

All Payer Claims Database (APCD):

Currently, the Utah APCD has claims information from roughly 80% of Utahns. It includes all of the plans in commercial markets, except for the ERISA self-funded plans that have not opted in, that have 2,500 or more beneficiaries. This means fully and self-insured employers (minus ERISA self-funded plans that have not opted in), third party administrators, pharmacy benefit managers and dental insurers. It includes ACA plans, Medicaid, and Medicare Advantage. We do not have complete data for Medicare parts A, B, & D at this time. Medicare parts A, B, & D run from 2008 to 2016. The database contains information about diagnosis, procedures, costs, payment, patient demographics and more. To learn more, please view the data use manuals.

HEDIS:

The Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) is comprised of nationally recognized performance measures used in monitoring the quality of care provided by health plans. Our program produces an annual report detailing the quality and performance of Utah plans compared to their national counterparts and state averages.

CAHPS:

Consumer Assessment of Health Providers and Systems is an annual survey detailing how consumers rated aspects of their health plan. Raw survey answers are available as well as an annual report comparing plans.

Our oldest data set is hospital inpatient data (1992). Ambulatory and Emergency Department data is available from 1996. APCD data is available from 2013.

If you are interested in using our data to answer your question, you should fill out the data request form.  If we approve your request, we will make arrangements to securely send the data to you.

The Department of Health and Human Services offers free use of query tools to explore our data. We also have free information products. Besides these valuable services, there is a charge for using the data to help offset the cost of collecting and producing the data.

We do provide discounts to our data contributors and non-profit or educational institutions. Our pricing guide will help you see what your data will cost.

Once you have submitted a data request form, it can take anywhere from three weeks to three months to get the data shipped. The time for approval is largely determined by the type of data you are requesting. Requests for de-identified data sets can be approved more quickly than requests for sensitive data sets and may require review by committees that meet only once a month.

Some of the full data sets are extremely large. For example, to use the full APCD database, you would need a dedicated server with at least a terabyte of encrypted storage. Having said that, some of our standard and custom data sets are much smaller and can be analyzed on a personal computer. We also have the ability to customize any data set to fit your analytic needs. We can send a file in almost any common file type – Excel, SPSS, CSV, SAS, etc.

The All Payer Claims Database (APCD) is updated at least annually. The Healthcare Facility Databases are updated quarterly. With preliminary ED encounters being submitted monthly.

Our data is used by healthcare providers, healthcare carriers, policy makers, and public health researchers to answer hundreds of questions about healthcare cost, quality and utilization by different populations.