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Overview Of The Project
On July 1, 2002, the Alabama Department of Public Health, Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), received a federal State Planning Grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration. The purpose of the project is to allow the gathering of data about the health insurance status of the people in Alabama (on state and sub-state levels) and to study health insurance coverage options which might be available to address the uninsured in the state. This project is known as the IDEA Project (Insurance Directions for Every Alabamian).
The IDEA project uses a three (3) step approach to achieve its aim: (1) Gathering primary data and using this plus secondary data to inform the discussion; (2) The use of groups of people to research ideas; and, (3) The use of stakeholders to assess to feasibility and political popularity of the options presented.
The group approach consists of a Workgroup and four study committees all comprised of a broad base of Alabamians. The Workgroup is comprised of upper-level decision makers, key advocates, health care providers, insurance vendors, and representative of the business communities across the state. The study committees are comprised, as well, of a wide, interdisciplinary range of people who have an interest in health insurance for Alabamians. All of these groups have an open membership policy and anyone may join at any time. The Workgroup meets monthly to review the progress of the project and to suggest other avenues for investigation. The study committees meet more frequently to research possible insurance coverage options.
The data arm of the project consists of two (2) primary data gathering approaches and at least one new secondary data assessment program. Primary data is initially being gathered, via a telephone survey, on the insured, the uninsured, the underinsured, and the unstably insured in Alabama. This approach will ultimately yield demographic, employment, and other quantitative data on 7,200 households in the state. This survey began in October 2002 and is scheduled to conclude in February 2003. The second approach to gather primary data will be to gather quantitative data by conducting focus groups. These focus groups are scheduled to be held during February and March 2003. A new platform for correlating data elements within selected data bases is also available for use by project participants. The platform, known as the Multi State Integrated Database (MSID) was developed specifically for use by projects such as the IDEA project so that many data questions can be answered almost instantaneously. The MSID contains all of the data elements for Alabama that are within the following national data sets: Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), the Current Population Survey (CPS), and the County Business Patterns database (CBP). In the spring of 2003, Alabama’s household telephone survey data will be added to the MSID in addition to possibly one more national database.
The third step of the project will be to assess the feasibility of the different options researched and to assess their popularity among different sectors of the population. This will be accomplished in a spring meeting of key stakeholders in the issue of covering the uninsured. To assist in the process, a wireless audience response system has been purchased which will allow participants to anonymously voice their preferences for different coverage options while also allowing their votes to be categorized according to participant demographics. That is, while the participants will not be individually identified, the project will be able to distinguish which sectors of the population (employers, advocates, etc.) preferred different options.
Information on the project’s processes and findings will be documented in a report by the end of July 2003.
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