Overview of the CMS Chronic Condition Data Warehouse, Contents, Key Features, and General Statistics

Dr. O'Donnell, Dr. Schneider, and Ms. Dean from IFMC will present a general overview of the CCW, including content, key features, data request process, and general CCW statistics. The Chronic Condition Data Warehouse (CCW) was made available in 2006 from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in response to section 723 of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003. The CCW contains deidentified beneficiary enrollment, institutional and noninstitutional claims, and assessment data linked across provider settings for services provided in 1999 through current (5% random sample of Medicare beneficiaries for 1999-2004, and 100% Medicare beneficiaries for 2005 forward). The link key is a unique, unidentifiable beneficiary key designed to create a patient-centric view of enrollment and service utilization. While all claims and assessment data are available from the CCW, twenty-one chronic conditions have been predefined for ease of timely data extraction and delivery (see www.ccwdata.org for details). Researchers may also define custom cohorts or submit finder files to IFMC for data extraction.

IFMC will discuss various types of data that can be easily obtained from the CCW, as well as overall summaries of enrollment, utilization, and chronic condition statistics. Future enhancements and information regarding linkage to other CMS data sources will also be described. The following panelists will showcase more in-depth projects they have pursued using the CCW data to explore health policy questions or produce chronic condition statistics.