MA APCD

CHIA works with approximately 60 Massachusetts APCD organizations to ensure valid, high quality monthly data submissions. Payers must deliver their submission files within 30 days after the end of each month. CHIA runs each file through a series of file- and field-level edits to confirm formatting and to check for data quality issues. CHIA notifies payers if their file(s) do not pass these intake edits so that they can correct and resend them. If data submission fixes are required, submitters spend additional time fixing, validating and resubmitting data files.

Following receipt of all files, CHIA loads the data into the APCD Data Warehouse and performs a series of steps including: data standardization, data cleaning, claims versioning, creation of derived fields and filters, and other enhancements. This process can take from eight to twelve weeks depending on whether we identify issues during testing.

Before an annual release is finalized, CHIA’s quality assurance team performs an eight to ten week quality assurance validation process to test the completeness and quality of select fields as well as any new product features and enhancements. If updates are required as a result of testing, CHIA performs comprehensive regression testing. After completing quality assurance testing, CHIA’s release assurance team spends approximately eight weeks validating the data creation process and ensuring data completeness and accuracy. We then extract the most recent data to create the annual APCD Release Data Mart, which becomes the source for all data extracts.

CHIA extracts data from the APCD Release Data Mart to create extract files for its customers. It can take from five to seven days to create an extract file. CHIA prioritizes delivery of extracts to Commonwealth agencies doing research in support of healthcare policy. Second priority is given to organizations that submit data. Third priority goes to independent researchers.