Leading the Quality Institute means working on improving health care safety, quality, and affordability for everyone. Our work includes tracking policies that either help or harm that mission and working with you, our members, to make things better. With federal assaults on public health, including attacks on evidence-based science and medicine, cuts to insurance subsidies that caused people to lose coverage, and new barriers to Medicaid enrollment, it is easy to get discouraged these days.

For me — and I know for many of you — I get the most satisfaction from my job when I am working to improve things. One way we can do this is to track how these federal changes are harming people across New Jersey. We can then use the compiled benchmarks to show the amount of harm caused and to make the case for improvement and reinvestment.

Our wide-ranging H.R.1 report calls for such action and outlines data that could be collected. We are calling this tool the NJ Health Outcomes Tracker or “NJ HOT Spots.”  We invite you to join us in this effort and make your own suggestions of what metrics should be included in the tracker.  Ultimately, the tracker is for the state to own and run, but let’s get this launched together to support the need to see data and use it for improving health.

For now, we are focusing on three critical areas: public health and immunization data; Medicaid enrollment including Cover All Kids data; and ACA enrollment data. We further break down these categories by different populations and types of care that are under greatest attack. Given the scope of the federal actions, the seriousness of the impending harm to NJ residents, and the urgency needed in our response, we recommend that NJ HOT Spots should be updated and published quarterly.

We look forward to seeing how others can help visualize the data and use it along with qualitative data to capture personal experiences and needs and to design and implement programs that improve areas of concern.

Health care is essential and the repercussions of recent federal action will be too great to ignore. We will need clear data to understand where we were before the harmful changes and where the greatest needs lie. We can use that concrete information to advocate for where we need to improve and to outline the road back to a healthier state. With this tracking tool in place, New Jersey will be better positioned to understand the true toll of the federal attacks on health care and how we can best respond.

Take a look at our initial proposed version of NJ HOT Spots.