Find out what drugs are being dispensed where in Medicaid.

Let's move away from price for a minute and find out what Medicaid is spending its prescription dollars on and where. That's the purpose of the 46brooklyn Medicaid Utilization Dashboard. We simply wanted to provide the means to poke around within Medicaid's utilization data to provide you with some helpful context on each state program. Be warned though – using this dashboard will likely leave you with more questions than answers. It sure has for us! But that's the research process. So, grab a cup of coffee (or two) and dig in!

Data Sources

How we Created our Dataset

46brooklyn's visualization tool of choice = Tableu Prep
Lag effect NADAC prices (NADAC is reported on roughly a one-month lag)
Aggregate weekly NADAC into quarterly NADAC
Join State Utilization Database and lagged quarterly NADAC on NDC and Year-Quarter

NOTE: While we are not displaying NADAC values in this dashboard (to avoid unit mismatches), we leverage the NADAC database to bring in better drug naming conventions than are available in the state utilization database.

How to Use

Choose year and quarter
Choose one NDC Description
Choose Fee for Service (FFS), Managed Care (MCO), or both
The heat map displays prescriptions dispensed for the chosen drug and time period relative to ALL Medicaid prescriptions (both FFS and MCO) dispensed during the same time period
Click on any state to display the top-25 drugs dispensed by dollar amount and program type

NOTE: Q1 2018 state utilization data (to us) appears to be incomplete at this time. We will update this dashboard again when CMS re-publishes its 2018 dataset. This viz is easiest to use on a desktop, as you can enter text in the dropdown filters to speed up your search. Also, due to space limitations, we had to remove a lot of the functionality of this dashboard on mobile devices. Long story short, we highly recommend using this on a desktop. Thanks!

v 1.1 - posted October 24,2018
For full release notes click here