Hi, Atlanta! 

Before I was a journalist, I worked in Atlanta hospital emergency rooms helping doctors with their documentation. There, I learned about the magical codes that our medical system runs on. Every disease and procedure has a unique code. These numerical codes undergird many aspects of health care in America, from public health surveillance to policy decisions to insurance payments and medical bills. 

A joint partnership between the state government and the Georgia Tech Research Institute  has figured out a way to harness that data, resulting in the wonkily named but incredibly powerful tool: the All-Payer Claims Database. 

Insurers submit data about their claims to the database, which includes information on a staggering 2.24 billion claims from 2018 to 2025. The breadth and depth of the data make this a very valuable resource, and the team behind it has started to produce meaningful reports about trends in Georgia health care. 

Here are a few of the tool’s many resources: 

• The urban-rural health access tool provides rich data about disparities across a host of specialties and services. The average distance needed to travel to get a C-section in rural Georgia is about 30.5 miles, while it is about 15.9 miles in urban areas. Fulton County has 696 pediatric providers while many rural counties just have one. The tool even includes data on disparities in dental access. There are also equally rich data tools for telehealth, cost comparisons, and the burden of chronic conditions. 

• The website also features in-depth reports about health in Georgia, including a 112-page report on pediatric and adolescent mental health trends in the period from 2018 to 2024. More young Georgians are seeking help for mental health conditions than prior to the pandemic, with a notable increase in teenage girls seeking help for “internalizing disorders” like depression, anxiety, trauma, and self-injury. That could be due to an increase in the number of patients with those conditions and other factors like increased awareness and screening.

• Other reports look at antibiotic stewardship in dentistry, infant health outcomes, opioids for low back pain, and adherence to breast cancer screening guidelines. 

• Organizations, researchers, and other government agencies can request custom datasets (typically for a fee). 

These datasets are a valuable resource, though there are caveats, with not all Georgians represented. Crucially, the uninsured are left out. Some datasets are missing Medicaid and Medicare data, though that will be added in the future. Information about patients’ race, income, and educational status is also absent. And there could be Georgians with a range of medical conditions who are not getting treatment, which means the dataset doesn’t show the complete picture of our state’s health. 

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