Project Brief

Medicaid information is notoriously complex and voluminous, employing numerous systems at the national and state levels. A wealth of information for decision-makers is contained in these systems but accessing the information to provide meaningful reports and graphics can be extremely difficult. The systems that house the data were built to process the data rather than to report from it. To meet data storage and reporting needs, Wostmann, working with the State of Alaska Department of Health and Social Services, created the data warehouse JUCE (Juneau Claims and Eligibility). JUCE draws Medicaid eligibility and claims information dating from 1996 from existing systems. 

The data in the JUCE system is used for budget analysis, for example; reporting on Medicaid spending to the State Legislature is accomplished using data extracted from JUCE. On the back end, the data in JUCE is organized and uploaded on a periodic basis using Data Warehouse structures rather than the transactional relational structures in use in typical interactive data systems. The data warehouse structures were optimized by Wostmann for retrieval and analysis of very large data sets (several million records). Wostmann provided several years of support for the JUCE system, including automating backups and assisting with developing new data products.