Today’s story about the number of foster kids on psychotropic drugs uses 2008 numbers because AHCCCS wanted the Star to pay a commercial rate of $175 an hour to provide newer prescription claims statistics in a format that would allow Star reporters to analyze them.
The Star offered to pay the hourly wage of the employee who would do the work to make the data both usable and anonymous, but the Star will not pay a commercial fee for access to public records. A 1993 Superior Court case involving Star Publishing Co. deemed newsgathering a noncommercial activity.
AHCCCS, which stores prescription claims data for children in foster care and nonfoster children in Medicaid, also would not answer questions on medication utilization rates among foster children unless the Star pays the commercial rate hour for AHCCCS to calculate those rates. AHCCCS says the rates are not public record because the data do not exist in the format the Star is requesting.
“We balance transparency with respecting the private health information of our members and complying with federal and state privacy laws,” said Monica Coury, assistant director for AHCCCS’s Office of Intergovernmental Relations, in an email.
AHCCCS stores prescription claims data in a relational database containing multiple tables, so prescription claim information for the same child may appear in different tables.
To make the prescription data usable but still anonymous, the state could replace each child’s private AHCCCS ID with a dummy ID that stays consistent across the database. The dummy IDs would let the Star see when multiple prescription claims belong to the same child, without being able to identify the child.
The Star argues replacing the ID is an inherent part of the redaction process: To simply remove IDs without providing another identifier is altering public records by making like records into unlike records. But AHCCCS deputy general counsel Gina Relkin says adding a dummy ID is creating a new record, which the state is not obligated to do under the state’s public-records law.
AHCCCS offered to provide the claims data without a replacement ID, but Relkin acknowledged the data in that form would be useless in determining utilization rates.
Kathryn Marquoit, Arizona assistant ombudsman for public access, said the Star’s argument and AHCCCS’s argument about the claims data are both fair, but there isn’t yet case law to guide this situation.
