Limitations With California Medicaid Data for Palliative and End of Life Care Quality Measures

In 2014 the California legislature passed Senate Bill 1004 (SB 1004) that was designed to expand access to specialty palliative care for individuals served by California's Medicaid (known as Medi-Cal) Managed Care Plans (MCPs). The California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) operationalized the legislation by developing minimum requirements for palliative care programs that all MCPs must meet or exceed.⁷ Quality and utilization data specific to California's Medicaid population are needed for stakeholders to identify care deficiencies and disparities, describe the end of life experience and utilization patterns of MCP members, compare these patterns to Medicare beneficiaries or other populations, and set appropriate targets to help monitor progress. We evaluated the feasibility of using Medicaid claims data and encounter data either by partnering with MCPs or by obtaining statewide data from DHCS to measure the quality of palliative care and end of life care. In a concurrent but separate effort, we analyzed administrative data supplied by three MCPs as part of a prospective pilot of standards for home-based palliative care in California, including care delivered to Medicaid beneficiaries under SB 1004. Beyond the practical challenges of allowing time for data access and approvals, both projects revealed several limitations to using administrative data to assess quality of palliative and end of life care for a Medicaid population. We describe these challenges that undermined our confidence in analysis results and propose solutions to measuring the quality of palliative and end of life care for Medicaid patients and suggested next steps.