Frequently Asked Questions for UDS

What’s a countable UDS visit?

The UDS manual provides extensive guidance about how to determine which visits may be counted for UDS reporting. Relevant allows health centers to customize the mapping rules by which visits are determined to be countable.

The key concept is the uds_universe column in the Visits data element. Generally speaking, this column must be true for a visit to count for most UDS tables. To understand the logic by which this column is set, consult the mapping of the Visits data element and/or its underlying transformer.

For Table 5, additional rules require a visit to have a staff_member_type_id mapped in order to qualify as a visit. For parts of Table 6A, additional rules require a visit to have an entry in one of the following Visit Set Membership data elements: UDS Medical, UDS Vision, UDS Mental Health, UDS Substance Use Disorder, or UDS Dental. Consult the on-screen help for Tables 5 and 6A for details.

For Table 6B, patients must have a “UDS universe” visit and a “qualifying visit,” which is defined differently for each quality measure. See Inclusion criteria for UDS quality measures for details.

ZIP Codes Table and Table 4How is a patient’s insurance determined?

Both the Zip Codes Table and Table 4 classify patients by insurance. In each case, the UDS manual specifies that patients should be classified based on their primary medical insurance at the time of the patient’s last visit during the UDS year. The logic to determine these groupings can be complex. Consult our help article, About UDS Insurance Groupings, for a detailed walk-through.

Table 6AWhat about procedures that aren’t billed?

Some services, like COVID tests, Pap tests, mammograms, or flu shots, might be provided without a billing code attached. Depending on the line, Relevant accounts for these services either by using Data Elements or by applying custom billing or diagnosis codes to Visits. Learn more about counting services in UDS Table 6A.

How is UDS data refreshed?

The data in the UDS module is refreshed as part of Relevant’s nightly data pipeline. As part of the pipeline run, Relevant crunches the data for UDS tables and stores the results as materialized views. These views are calculated after the Data Elements stage of the pipeline completes.

You can trigger a manual refresh of the UDS materialized views by re-running any of the data elements that are referenced in a given view. If you’re not sure which data elements are referenced in a given view, try refreshing the Patients data element—it’s used by all of them.

Some UDS data depends directly on a UDS quality measure (for example, in Table 7). To refresh this data, re-run the measure in question. This will refresh any materialized view that depends on the measure. After refreshing the measure, you may also need to refresh materialized views by running the Patients data element.