Fall 2023 CHIP graduate, Kaniqua Outlaw is a Manager of Health Systems Integration at NASTAD - an organization that is driven to advance the health of people living with HIV/AIDS. Her internship during the Fall 2023 semester focused on utilizing Medicaid claims data to identify people with HIV to better support patient care. Medicaid is the largest insurer for HIV care in the United States. The medical data generated from Medicaid claims can help inform medical care for those people living with HIV. Currently, the methods used for analyzing Medicaid data to identify people with HIV are not reliable. Data can be of poor quality and incomplete or inaccurate, which impacts the ability to determine effectiveness of treatment and gaps in care. Outlaw looked at the various considerations for identifying people with HIV, including ICD-10 codes for diagnosis and CPT codes for specific services related to HIV. She worked to develop an algorithm that considers patient healthcare services received across states, links paid claims and patient encounter data, and also takes demographic variables into consideration. Next steps for her project include developing a code to run the algorithm, implement queries and develop a synopsis of the process.
