The HCBS Taxonomy: A New Language for Classifying Home- and Community-Based Services

As states make home- and community-based services (HCBS) more accessible, researchers have become more interested in understanding service use and spending, but analyzing HCBS at the national level can be challenging. With the development of the HCBS taxonomy—a uniform classification system composed of 18 categories and more than 60 services—states and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services now have a common language for describing and categorizing community-based long-term care services, enabling researchers to analyze HCBS use at the person-level. Implementing the HCBS taxonomy in Medicaid Analytic eXtract (MAX) data for 2010, this brief describes the HCBS taxonomy; explains the construction of a crosswalk to map claims to taxonomy categories; and presents descriptive, exploratory, statistics on state-, service-, and person-level HCBS expenditures for the 28 states whose MAX data files were approved by June 1, 2013.