Characteristics of Medicaid Beneficiaries Who Use Rural Health Clinics
BACKGROUND
For almost four decades, Rural Health Clinics (RHCs) (currently numbering about 4,100) have served patients from underserved rural areas. Although Medicaid is an important payer for RHCs, little is known about Medicaid patients and the services provided to them partly because of the complexity of identifying claims generated from RHCs in Medicaid claims data sources. Another brief written by the North Carolina Rural Health Research Program enumerates a method of identifying RHC claims based on up to four fields in Medicaid claims.1 We follow suggestions made in that brief to identify claims from RHCs or those from individual providers under RHC programs and describe the population who used RHC services from four Medicaid states. This description of RHC users should assist policy makers and researchers in understanding and planning for the population who receives services from RHCs.