New Dashboard Tracks Monthly Enrollment in NC Medicaid

 

The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS) launched a new public dashboard in December 2023 to track monthly enrollment in NC Medicaid for people eligible through expansion. ​The NC Medicaid Expansion Enrollment Dashboard offers a detailed overview of enrollment trends in adults ages 19-64 who are newly eligible for full Medicaid health care coverage. The platform provides metrics such as enrollee demographic details and enrollment details by county, and highlights enrollment in NC Medicaid through expansion in rural counties. With the help of feedback from stakeholders, NCDHHS has updated the dashboard to reflect a new definition of “rural counties.”

The expansion dashboard uses the United States Office of Management and Budget classification of core based statistical area (CBSA) that categorizes the state’s population into two statistical areas: Metropolitan and Micropolitan. It then breaks it down further to classify counties as being Central or Outlying to those statistical areas. All counties in the Metropolitan category are classified as Urban. The updated version of the expansion dashboard classifies counties in the “Metropolitan – Outlying” category as Rural. This is consistent with the classification used by the NCDHHS Office of Rural Health (ORH). With this change, 71 counties in the state are now reflected as rural and 29 counties are reflected as urban. Previously, the dashboard categorized 54 counties in North Carolina as rural and 46 counties as urban.

The updated rural county definition is reflected in the June 2024 NC Medicaid Expansion Enrollment Dashboard. For comments or questions regarding the dashboard, please email [email protected].