Medicaid/CHIP Environmental Scanning and Program Characteristics (ESPC)

ESPC development is sponsored by the CMS Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation in partnership with the Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services (CMCS) under the authority of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

The ESPC database is in a Microsoft (MS) Access format and contains Medicaid and CHIP data, for the 50 States and District of Columbia.  Specifically, The ESPC database predominantly houses information on Medicaid and CHIP program characteristics as well as selected environmental factors that are available through other publicly available databases.  Program characteristics include data elements such as eligibility criteria, the presence of waiver programs, managed care penetration, benefit coverage, reimbursement levels, and expenditures. 

It does not represent an integrated, authoritative source for Medicaid and CHIP data, but does offer an important information source for CMS' Medicaid Analytic eXtract (MAX) file, comparative effectiveness research (CER), policy studies, and program evaluations. 

Information in the ESPC database is presented as made available and has not been altered, changed, or validated.  Please note that differences in variable documentation may exist depending on the data source. To the extent possible all source documentation for the specific variables are provided. Users of the ESPC database need to be mindful of these potential differences in data, when selecting variables of interest.

Users are referred to the noted data sources for complete detailed data documentation.  Variable names and descriptions in the ESPC database retain the terminology in the original data source.  Users should exercise caution when using ESPC data elements for calculations to ensure that the data elements are based on compatible populations.

A User Guide with detailed information on the features of the ESPC database and instructions on how to find and extract data can be found in the downloads section below.  Help buttons located on each screen also provide information on the ESPC database.

This database contains data from 2005 onward, and will be updated in calendar year 2013.

Users operating the 64 bit version of Microsoft Windows 7 with the 64 bit version of Microsoft Office 2010 may receive an error message when using the ESPC Database.  To avoid the error, we recommend using the 32 bit version of Microsoft Office or the runtime version of the ESPC Database.