The Maine Health Data Organization has, in accordance with Rule Chapter 120: Release of Data to the Public, instituted a process for the purpose of notifying users and providers of health care data when the MHDO receives a request for health data and accepts that request. In addition to sending electronic notification to interested parties and to providers that are responsible for the submission of the data, we provide the summary page of the ten most recent data requests below. If you are interested in seeing requests prior to the last on this page, you will find them here: https://mhdo.maine.gov/dataRequests_Archived.htm
For all data requests, the data providers or other interested parties may submit comments related to the data request to the Executive Director. To be considered, comments must be received by the Executive Director in writing or by electronic notification no later than thirty business days after the initial posting of the data request on the MHDO web site. If the Executive Director determines that (a.) the comments received are of significant enough importance to delay the release of data and/or (b.) additional information is required from the requesting party to address the comments; then the data shall not be released until the additional information has been received from the requesting party and an additional review is conducted by the Executive Director or the MHDO Data Release Subcommittee, as applicable, to ensure that the requesting party conforms to all applicable requirements of this chapter.
The Executive Director will bring all comments received from the data providers and or other interested parties for the release of Level III Data to the MHDO Data Release Subcommittee for consideration.
Individuals who want to opt out of a specific Level III data request may do so by completing this MHDO Choice Disclosure Form no later than 30 business days after the initial posting of the data request. If you opt out of Level III data requests, you will remain opted out unless you choose to opt back in via completion of the MHDO Choice Disclosure Form.
NOTE: If you would like to be notified when new data requests are posted, please email your request.
| Request # | Organization and Data Applicant | Consultant | Comment Close Date | Data Requested | Purpose of Request, Benefits to the Citizens of Maine, and Public Reporting Plans | Status (Approved or Withdrawn) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026030503 | RAND
Brian Briscombe |
N/A | 5/7/2026 | MHDO Level II Q1 2023 – Q4 2025 Medical Claims including Date of Birth. | This data request seeks to add additional years of MHDO data (Q1 2023 – Q4 2025) to previously approved data request number 2022121201. Researchers at the RAND Corporation will reprice commercial medical claims from MHDO using Medicare's groupers and pricing algorithms and will release a public research report that includes commercial prices as a percent of Medicare prices for hospitals and hospital systems identified by name. This research report will update and expand on the findings in previous RAND reports released in May 2019, September 2020 and December 2024. The public research report will include hospitals from around the country and will be created using claims data from three sources: self-insured employers, state-based all payer claims databases (APCDs), and health plans. We will exclude patients aged 65+ because their care may have been partially covered by public insurance (our study is focused on prices paid for patients with commercial insurance). RAND will not publish prices by payer and will only publish by facility. . This project will benefit the citizens of Maine by providing them with a detailed hospital price report for hospitals in Maine, as well as comparisons among hospitals in Maine versus hospitals in other states. Key audiences for the report will be (1) self-insured employers that participate in the study and that are assessing the reasonableness of the prices they are paying for hospital care, (2) other employers that are struggling with high and rising health care costs and that want to better understand patterns and trends in hospital prices, and (3) policymakers and researchers who are concerned with hospital pricing and price transparency. | |
| 2026030501 |
ME CDC
Angie Bellefleur |
N/A | 5/7/2026 | MHDO Level II Q1 2026 – Q4 2026 Hospital Inpatient Encounters including City/ZIP, Date of Birth, FIPS Code and Race & Ethnicity. | This data request seeks to add an additional year of MHDO data to previously approved data request number 2024121601. In 2021 Maine received funds to become part of the National Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health (AIM). This ongoing initiative involves engaging hospitals in the implementation of patient safety bundles designed to improve the quality of health care provided to women around the time of pregnancy with the overall goal to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity. Currently, 49 US states are enrolled in the AIM initiative. As part of this initiative, states are asked to provide administrative data on severe maternal morbidity by hospital (de-identified) to monitor progress on QI efforts. Maine selected to focus on maternal hypertension as the state's first QI initiative. There are currently 20 Maine birthing hospitals currently participating in the project. Maine people will benefit from a data-driven approach to implementing best practices related to reducing maternal morbidity and improving care for pregnant people with severe hypertension. MHDO data will allow for ongoing monitoring of maternal morbidity to assess the effectiveness of the implementation of these evidence-based practices in Maine hospitals. | |
| 2026022502 |
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Tugba Somuncu |
N/A | 4/30/2026 | MHDO Ad Hoc Request – Level I CY 2005 – 2025 Aggregate Daily Emergency Department Counts by County | This project seeks to understand how extreme weather events affect emergency department (ED) visits in the United States. The study will assess whether ED visit volumes change during extreme weather and which types (e.g., heat stress or cold exposure) are most affected. The project will also evaluate how hospital closures influence healthcare access and utilization during these events, particularly in rural areas like Maine where closures may further limit timely care. Findings will inform climate adaptation strategies, highlight disparities in healthcare access, and clarify the public health impacts of weather-related ED use. To capture daily variation in temperature and control for underlying seasonal utilization patterns, our project requires observing ED utilization at the daily level across multiple years. Daily county-level temperature data will be linked with ED records from 2005 to 2025 to examine whether extreme heat or cold leads to increased ED visits. In the second phase, we will analyze the impact of hospital closures, using publicly available data from the Sheps Center, to assess how closures influence ED utilization patterns during extreme weather. This study aims to identify both the direct health impacts of climate extremes and how the adaptive responses shaped by healthcare access constraints influence responses to those events. Benefits to the Citizens of Maine: As one of the most rural states in the nation, many Maine communities often face long travel times to the nearest emergency department, a problem that worsens when facilities close. These dangers are compounded by the fact that Maine has the oldest median age of any state, and older adults are disproportionately vulnerable to temperature extremes and needing emergency care during such events. By examining how extreme weather affects ED utilization and how hospital closures restrict access to timely care in rural areas, this project will provide Maine's policymakers, health systems, and emergency planners with actionable evidence to guide decisions about healthcare infrastructure, climate adaptation, and targeted investments in high risk Maine communities. | |
| 2025081802 |
Cigna Healthcare
Donna Atienza |
N/A | 4/9/2026 | MHDO Level II Q1 2023 – Q4 2025 Medical Claims including Anonymous Payer ID | This Cigna Healthcare (CH) project is a continuation of previously authorized data requests 2023090102 and 2021051901. The results of that project supported our negotiation with our providers to conform to current market rates, and we are requesting another two years of MHDO claims data. One part of the data analysis focuses on the reasonableness of medical costs in the commercial market. The data will provide CH the ability to assess health care costs for the Cigna network vis-à-vis other major carriers in the Maine commercial market. Second, we intend to look at a number of areas of interest to assess patterns of care that may be a concern in terms of appropriateness or perhaps from a geographic availability/coverage perspective, such as use of high technology services (e.g. MRI, Pet Scans, CAT Scans), use of high cost therapies, or high volume implants (e.g. hips and knees). This project will increase transparency around the affordability of medical care and the ability to better understand where Mainers aligned with Cigna can obtain services at rates that are reasonably compared to market norms. This should lead to improved decisions around where to obtain care and allow Cigna to better deal with rates that are dramatically above standard market pricing. In addition, our Medical Quality teams will use the MHDO data to identify patterns of care and compare those patterns to internal patterns to better understand where opportunities for improvement might exist. The ultimate goal is to improve the quality and affordability of care for our members living in the state of Maine. | |
| 2025080501 |
Healthcare Purchaser Alliance of Maine
Sara Fitzgerald |
Certilytics | 2/12/2026 | MHDO Level II Q1 2022 – Q3 2026 Medical Claims, Medical Eligibility, Pharmacy Claims and Pharmacy Eligibility, including City/ZIP, Practitioner Identifiers and Anonymous Payer Name/ID. | The Healthcare Purchaser Alliance of Maine (HPA) is requesting Level II MHDO data to provide Maine employers and health trusts (both public and private purchasers) with statewide benchmarking information on Per Member Per Month (PMPM) cost, service utilization, member cost sharing, disease prevalence, and quality measures (e.g., cancer screening rates, preventive visit utilization, non-emergent emergency department use, etc.). The HPA will incorporate these benchmarks into employer-specific claims-based reporting that we produce using data extracts provided by insurers, Third-Party Administrators (TPAs), and Pharmacy Benefits Managers (PBMs). These benchmarks will allow Maine employers to understand how their population of insured employees and dependents compares to a large swath of Maine’s commercial market on a set of key healthcare measures. In addition, the HPA may use the data to understand how proposed legislation may impact healthcare affordability, access, and quality in Maine; generate statewide claims-based quality measures, including cancer screening rates; inform grant proposals to help address healthcare affordability; and identify emerging cost and/or utilization trends across medical and pharmacy claims. This project will benefit the people of Maine by providing insight into statewide or regional trends impacting healthcare affordability, access, and quality through presentations to policymakers and HPA members; and benchmarking reports delivered to some of Maine’s largest employers and trusts who help to shape the commercial health insurance market in the state. | Pending |
| 2025031401 |
NH DHHS
Jennifer Howley |
N/A | 2/11/2026 | MHDO Level II Q1 2023 – Q4 2025 Hospital Inpatient and Outpatient Encounter Data including City/ZIP, DOB and Race & Ethnicity. | This data request seeks to add additional years of MHDO data (Q1 2023 – Q4 2025) to previously approved data request number 2017081603. The Maine Health Data Organization (MHDO) provides the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services (NH DHHS) with hospital encounter data for New Hampshire residents treated in Maine healthcare facilities. On-going surveillance of hospital encounters plays an important role in understanding and reacting to disease and injury. MHDO inpatient and outpatient hospital encounter data on NH residents from hospitals in Maine are important to identify specific health threats in NH, to support research into the cause of disease or injury, and to generally improve the public health of the State. Because of this collaboration, people of Maine are benefiting from the project results in terms of determining vulnerable areas and impacts on public health. NH DPHS presents selected health outcomes (e.g. asthma, heart disease, poisoning, etc.) in statistical reports that can be found via the NH DHHS Data Portal. | Pending |
| 2025021901 |
American Board of Family Medicine
Mingliang Dai |
N/A | 1/22/2026 | MHDO Level II Q1 2022 – Q4 2023 Custom Extract: Includes Medical Claims, Medical Eligibility, Pharmacy Claims, Pharmacy Eligibility, Practitioner Identifiable Data, MHDO De-Identified Person Directory, and City/Zip, Race and Ethnicity. | The goal of our study is to quantify the comprehensiveness of care provided to Medicaid patients by primary care clinicians in Maine. Despite being the largest program that provides medical care to low-income people in the U.S., studies have found that the majority of Medicaid patients get their primary care from under-resourced practices that tend to provide lower quality of care compared to practices that serve primarily non-Medicaid patients. Comprehensiveness, a core value function of primary care, is defined as the provision of integrated, accessible health care services by clinicians who are accountable for addressing a large majority of personal health care needs. A study of Medicare beneficiaries found that patients receiving more comprehensive care from their primary care physicians incurred lower total cost. However, little research has been done to quantify the comprehensiveness of care (or the lack of) provided to Medicaid patients and to examine the associations between comprehensiveness and important outcomes for the Medicaid program such as total cost. Our study will benefit the citizens of Maine by answering these questions by using all-payer claims databases of Colorado, Maine, and Virginia to measure the comprehensiveness of care provided to Medicaid patients and comparing it to Medicare and commercial patients in Maine. We plan to submit the findings for publication in peer-reviewed journals and present them at national research conferences. | Withdrawn |
| 2025030301 |
The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Michala Welch |
N/A | 12/19/25 | MHDO Level II Q1 2022 – Q4 2023 Custom Extract: Includes Medical Claims, Medical Eligibility, Pharmacy Claims, Pharmacy Eligibility, Practitioner Identifiable Data, MHDO De-Identified Person Directory, and City/Zip, Race and Ethnicity. | This data request seeks Maine Health Data Organization (MHDO) data to understand and quantify the comprehensiveness of care provided to Medicaid patients compared to patients with commercial insurance, and to examine the associations between comprehensiveness and important outcomes for the Medicaid program. We plan to use the MHDO’s all-payer claims database to measure the comprehensiveness of care provided to Medicaid patients and commercial patients. We will estimate and quantify the effects of health system-level, clinician-level, and practice-level comprehensiveness and continuity of care on total costs and utilization, non-elective hospitalizations, and emergency room visits for these populations. Our study will benefit the citizens of Maine by illuminating our understanding of the efficacy of comprehensiveness and continuity of care as a relevant quality measure and support value-based care for the Medicaid population in Maine. Potential publications of our research may include the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, the Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. | Approved |
| 2025092501 |
ME CDC
Eric Fromberg |
Public Consulting Group | 12/9/2025 | MHDO Level II Q1 2018- Q4 2024 Custom Extract: Includes Medical Claims related to Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia (ADRD). | This data request seeks to add additional quarters of MHDO data (Q1 2022 – Q4 2024) to previously approved data request number 2021092901. The Maine CDC is requesting a custom extract of aggregated Maine Health Data Organization medical claims data with the principal diagnoses related to Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia (ADRD). This request for MHDO data will continue to be utilized to change systems, environments, and policies in Maine to promote risk reduction, to improve early diagnosis, to prevent and manage comorbidities, and to avoid hospitalizations related to ADRD. The ME CDC will use the MHDO data to set priorities, to develop public health actions, to address social determinants of health, and to provide support for caregivers who take care of people with dementias. The Maine CDC has been awarded a grant to fund this work all aimed at preventing ADRD and increasing early detection and intervention and improve supports for families coping with ADRD – all of which will improve outcomes for the citizens of Maine who are diagnosed with ADRD and their families. | Approved |
| 2025050902 |
Brown University
Christopher Whaley |
N/A | 12/9/2025 | MHDO Level II Q1 2022 – Q4 2023 Custom Extract: Includes Medical Claims, Medical Eligibility, Pharmacy Claims, Pharmacy Eligibility, Practitioner Identifiable Data, MHDO De-Identified Person Directory, and City/Zip, Race and Ethnicity. | Over 70 percent of physicians are now employed by a health care system or corporate entity, including publicly traded and private equity firms. This change in the organization of physician markets can reduce competitiveness of health care markets and increase spending, for both commercial and Medicare patients. Many states are implementing policies that seek to either directly or indirectly regulate provider prices or direct patients towards lower-priced providers. Researchers at Brown University will reprice commercial medical claims from MHDO using Medicare's groupers and pricing algorithms and will conduct analyses of commercial prices as a percentage of Medicare prices for hospitals and hospital systems. We will use these data and methods to examine the impact of provider consolidation on health care prices, quality of care, and access to health services. We plan to: 1. Examine how hospital and corporate ownership leads to changes in intensity of care, quality of care, provider staffing, and prices. 2. Examine how hospital and corporate ownership leads to changes in referral patterns and how these changes interact with site-of-care payment differentials. 3. Test if hospital and corporate ownership leads providers to shift away from public payers of uninsured patients, exacerbating disparities in access to care. 4. Test effects of state regulations. Research products will be peer reviewed publications, white papers, and conference presentations. We will also communicate study findings to Maine policymakers and health care purchasers. Benefit to Citizens of Maine: This project will benefit the people of Maine by providing them with a detailed hospital price report for hospitals in Maine, as well as comparisons among hospitals in Maine versus hospitals in other states. Key audiences for the report will be (1) self-insured employers that participate in the study and that are assessing the reasonableness of the prices they are paying for hospital care, (2) other employers that are struggling with high and rising health care costs and that want to better understand patterns and trends in hospital prices, and (3) policymakers and researchers who are concerned with hospital pricing and price transparency. In addition, this study will examine how changes to the organization of the Main provider delivery system and market trends impact prices, quality of care, and access to services for Maine residents. | Withdrawn |
Note: If you are interested in seeing requests prior to the last on this page, you will find them here: https://mhdo.maine.gov/dataRequests_Archived.htm