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Maine's CHOICES CEO Project

Priority #6: Enhance Data Collection and Sharing

How do we know if the employment situation for people with disabilities is improving? How do we track the impact of our efforts? To succeed at measuring progress and refining our methods we need to have good information.

Currently, there is a lack of meaningful data about the employment experiences of Mainers with disabilities — specifically, information often called "employment outcomes," which includes the wages earned, hours worked, and length of time spent at a job.

Programs that serve people with disabilities often do not adequately track employment outcomes, nor do these programs track people over time. Moreover, many people receive employment assistance from multiple state systems that do not share information with one another. This makes it difficult to analyze which services are being used and which are overlapping.

Maine needs to improve its tracking of the employment experiences of people with disabilities. Once gathered, this information must be made available to the public so that it can be used by policymakers and other stakeholders to evaluate the current situation and to plan for future improvements.

Activities

The CHOICES CEO project is identifying existing employment outcome data and sources and adding this information to the Maine Disability and Employment Dashboard.

In addition, a strategic plan to improve data sharing across agencies and organizations will be developed. The plan will be created by a working group that will look at current and past efforts, continuing needs and challenges, and opportunities for gathering data on employment outcomes.

Based on the plan developed by this group, executive and/or legislative action will be recommended and inter-agency data sharing agreements will be instituted.

Goals

• Better collection and analysis of data pertaining to employment and disability. At a minimum, this information should include the number of people with disabilities who are hired and sustain employment, and the number of hours worked and wages paid to workers with disabilities.
• Better sharing of data among agencies and organizations. This shared information will be used to make meaningful improvements to services.
• Policymakers, employers and other stakeholders receive regularly updated reports about the effectiveness of public programs.
• Using good data, public dollars are better allocated to maximize the employment of people with disabilities.

Maine Resources

Participation in the Medicaid Buy-In Program: A Statistical Profile from Integrated Data is an extensive report was released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in May 2006. Please note that this is a large PDF file. Maine-specific data is available in a reader's guide (Word format) produced by the CHOICES CEO project.

Snapshot 2007 and the Disability Dashboard provide overviews of the current employment situation of people with disabilities in Maine, along with a discussion of the information sources on the topic.

The Maine Quality Choices Data Integration Project completed extensive work on data integration in Maine previous to the work of the CHOICES CEO project. Specifically, their web site offers the following:

• IDA: Creating a Virtual Information Service to Meet Maine's Need for Integrated Data: a brief summary of Maine's need for integrated data, the constraints on integrating data, a proposed solution, and implementation considerations. (PDF)
• Requirements Document: a description of the state's needs for integrated data, and confidentiality and other constraints on integrating data. (PDF)
• Glossary: definitions of acronyms and key terms. (PDF)
• Roadmap for Data System Integration (November 2001): a discussion of existing data system integration efforts in Maine, as well as recommended "next steps" for data system integration. (PDF)

National Resources

The National Coalition of Health Systems Development Library offers helpful resource materials on data collection and presentation. To quickly find these materials, select "Categories," type either "CMS Data Reports" or "Research and Evaluation" in the text box, and then click "Run Search."

The Cornell Employment and Disability Institute web site has a great online resource for disability statistics. The institute also offers two disability statistics publications, both of which are available in either HTML of PDF file format:

• The United States 2006 Disability Status Report (HTML or PDF)
• The Maine 2006 Disability Status Report (HTML or PDF)

Mathematica Policy Research is a national contractor of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The organization is conducting significant research related to employment and disability. MPR recently published a series of "Working with Disability" briefing papers. These papers focus on Medicaid buy-in programs — called the MaineCare Workers with Disabilities Option in Maine. Several interesting briefs are available:

• How Much Are Medicaid Buy-In Participants Earning? (PDF). One interesting finding reported is that the average annual earnings for a MaineCare Workers Option enrollee is about $8300, well above the national average of $7246.
• "Do Participants Increase Their Earnings After Enrolling in the Medicaid Buy-In Program?" One interesting finding reported in this brief is that Maine is among the top eight states where more than 50 percent of participants increased their earnings after they enrolled in the Buy-In program. Maine does not provide a grace period for those who lose work, which may signal that work is a strict condition for participation, thus attracting
  participants who are more likely to work.
• "How Do Medicaid Buy-In Participants Compare with Other Medicaid Enrollees with Disabilities?" One interesting finding reported in this brief is that, on average, Buy-In participants cost Medicaid $984 per-member per-month (PMPM) in 2000, almost 40 percent lower than the cost of other Medicaid enrollees with disabilities
• How Does the Medicaid Buy-In Program Relate to Other Federal Efforts to Improve Access to Health Coverage for Adults with Disabilities? (PDF)

CHOICES CEO activities are staffed out of the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine. This web site is part of the CHOICES CEO project, funded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services through a grant to Maine's Department of Health and Human Services (grant #11-P-92409/1-03). Views expressed do not represent official policy of the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, or the University of Southern Maine.