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APA Urges CMS To Keep Medication Data Accessible

Access to drug data in Medicaid and Medicare programs is vital to ongoing research efforts.

APA has asked the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to ensure continued access to datasets on medication utilization after the new Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit begins next January.

In a letter to CMS Administrator Mark McClellan, M.D., Ph.D., APA Medical Director James H. Scully Jr., M.D., noted that psychiatrists have numerous research projects under way involving medication utilization by patients covered under Medicaid. On January 1, 2006, an estimated 1.6 million patients who are eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare ("dual-eligible" beneficiaries) will transition from Medicaid to Medicare for their drug coverage. This transition, Scully wrote, "may inadvertently cause researchers to have difficulty accessing data on Medicaid beneficiaries."

Scully noted that research projects now in progress track patient outcomes and quality improvement relating to the prescribing of psychotropic medications to Medicaid beneficiaries. Scully used the state of Michigan as an example, where researchers have access to Medicaid data through an agreement between the state and the health maintenance organizations (HMOs) that serve the Michigan Medicaid population. The agreement has allowed HMOs to send claims data directly to the state's pharmacy benefits manager, who then makes the data available to researchers.

"It is reasonable to believe that most, if not all, states have some type of prescription-drug research on the Medicaid population," Scully wrote. "It is essential for the continuity and completion of these research projects that there is ongoing access to pharmaceutical utilization data after the Medicaid patients' transition to Medicare."

CMS, Scully wrote, "is in the best position to collect from the new Medicare Part D drug plans an array of drug-utilization data, including [data] on psychotropics, that can be made available to researchers nationwide."

Because research on utilization patterns, quality control, and patient outcomes inherently benefits not only the medical community but also government programs and regulators, "APA strongly encourages CMS to take steps to implement data-collection systems and activities and to make the datasets available to researchers nationwide."

APA's letter to CMS is posted online at <www.psych.org/advocacy_policy/reg_comments/APALettertoCMSonDataSharingforRMMBeneficiaries51205.pdf>.

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