Delaware’s Department of Health and Social Services and the Delaware Health Care Commission launch the Benchmark Trend Report Dashboard.
In 2018 Gov. John Carney signed an executive order establishing a state healthcare spending benchmark. The annual per-capita-rate-of-growth benchmark for healthcare spending was set at 3.25% in 2021.
Healthcare quality is simultaneously tracked on six measures that are evaluated and adjusted every three years.
The goal is to decrease the cost of healthcare while improving the quality.
The benchmark trend report was previously a paper report used primarily by state government agencies.
Now, it’s online as an interactive dashboard.
“This is really designed for the public to understand and to play with the data themselves in ways that can be useable for them to drive any future policy considerations in the healthcare space,” said DHSS Director of Health Care Reform Steven Costantino
Spending data can be viewed on a state, market and insurer level. Healthcare quality data is categorized similarly.
Costantio says it’s helpful for Delawareans who want to understand what’s driving healthcare spending.
“For example, if they wanted to know what was the rate of increase in Medicaid versus Commercial Insurance versus Medicare Advantage- they’re able to go in and parse out that information,” he explained. “So it's more usable. It gets more to specific questions that someone may have, whether it's a consumer or if it's a policy maker, in order to do more of a deep dive into the data in the regular trend report.”
This is the first iteration of the dashboard. Moving forward, it may see changes that make it more user friendly.
“We’re trying to be as transparent as possible to ultimately drive a better healthcare system,” said Costantino.
The data will be updated annually, with the next update coming this spring.
