The Obama administration, acting in concert with the health insurance trade group America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), announced today an agreement to develop a standardized set of healthcare quality measures for physicians. In particular, the new quality measurement system will track care given by accountable care organizations, patient-centered medical homes, primary care physicians, cardiologists, gastroenterologists, HIV and hepatitis C care providers, medical oncologists, orthopedists, obstetricians and gynecologists.
As physician's pay from insurance plans is more and more tied to quality outcomes - did the patient get well, or will there be additional claims down the road? - a system for measuring outcomes has become necessary. In recent years, government and private health plans have been working separately, and a confusing array of different measures for different companies has been growing. The CMS/AHIP agreement will seek to create a single standard system of measurement, relieving much of the burden caused by separate systems. In their news release, acting CMS administrator Andy Slavitt stated that "this agreement today will reduce unnecessary burdens for physicians and accelerate the country's movement to better quality." Representatives of the American Medical Association and the Americal Academy of Family Physicians praised the effort.
Showing posts with label quality data. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quality data. Show all posts
February 16, 2016
July 25, 2013
Two New Beta Provider Data Releases
This summer has seen one spectacular new release of healthcare provider data from CarePrecise already, and a second is on the way. The first one, released just a week ago, is already finding its way into EMR pre-population, new web apps, OpenPayments and HIE applications.
The Extended Professional, Group & Hospital(TM) dataset extends CarePrecise's flagship master database, CarePrecise Access Complete (CPAC), with verified group practice data for physicians and other providers, their hospital affiliations, medical schools and graduation years. The EPGH's Extended Hospital table provides an unduplicated list of all U.S. acute care, VA, children's and critical access hospitals that bill Medicare (essentially all of these hospital types bill Medicare, so this list is nearly complete; link it to hospital data in the CPAC, and you've got everything -- a more complete, up-to-date and verified database of physicians than the American Medical Association's list at a small fraction of the cost... plus more than 3 million other healthcare providers not included in the AMA data.
The EPGH has only been released in beta so far, and in beta it is being distributed to all current CPAC subscribers free of charge through September 2013. The EPGH/CPAC bundle is the only commercially available merged database of NPPES, LEIE, PECOS, PhysicianCompare and HospitalCompare data, and it contains all of the "hooks" necessary to link to CMS hospital quality data and forthcoming physician quality data.
Coming next is the beta release of CP ProCase(TM), a proper-case version of the name, mailing address and practice address in CPAC, for all approximately 4 million records. Using CPAC data for marketing and other communications will be easier and more professional looking. As with the EPGH dataset, the ProCase add-on will be available bundled with CPAC, and not separately.
Planned beta release of CP ProCase will coincide with the August 2013 CPAC update release. As with EPGH, ProCase will be distributed as a free beta for evaluation to all current CPAC subscribers. (Betas are not available on single download purchasers.)
And, as if that weren't enough, our popular software, CP ListMaker, is undergoing a rebuild to add EPGH functionality. (Proper casing is already a feature of CP ListMaker.) The new version -- 4.01 -- will sport new output queries that include the new extended data linked to list outputs, completely configurable to use the new information. Release date for CP ListMaker v4.01 is scheduled to coincide with the August CPAC data release.
Questions about the new products? Call your CarePrecise sales representative at (877) 782-2294.
The Extended Professional, Group & Hospital(TM) dataset extends CarePrecise's flagship master database, CarePrecise Access Complete (CPAC), with verified group practice data for physicians and other providers, their hospital affiliations, medical schools and graduation years. The EPGH's Extended Hospital table provides an unduplicated list of all U.S. acute care, VA, children's and critical access hospitals that bill Medicare (essentially all of these hospital types bill Medicare, so this list is nearly complete; link it to hospital data in the CPAC, and you've got everything -- a more complete, up-to-date and verified database of physicians than the American Medical Association's list at a small fraction of the cost... plus more than 3 million other healthcare providers not included in the AMA data.
The EPGH has only been released in beta so far, and in beta it is being distributed to all current CPAC subscribers free of charge through September 2013. The EPGH/CPAC bundle is the only commercially available merged database of NPPES, LEIE, PECOS, PhysicianCompare and HospitalCompare data, and it contains all of the "hooks" necessary to link to CMS hospital quality data and forthcoming physician quality data.
Coming next is the beta release of CP ProCase(TM), a proper-case version of the name, mailing address and practice address in CPAC, for all approximately 4 million records. Using CPAC data for marketing and other communications will be easier and more professional looking. As with the EPGH dataset, the ProCase add-on will be available bundled with CPAC, and not separately.
Planned beta release of CP ProCase will coincide with the August 2013 CPAC update release. As with EPGH, ProCase will be distributed as a free beta for evaluation to all current CPAC subscribers. (Betas are not available on single download purchasers.)
And, as if that weren't enough, our popular software, CP ListMaker, is undergoing a rebuild to add EPGH functionality. (Proper casing is already a feature of CP ListMaker.) The new version -- 4.01 -- will sport new output queries that include the new extended data linked to list outputs, completely configurable to use the new information. Release date for CP ListMaker v4.01 is scheduled to coincide with the August CPAC data release.
Questions about the new products? Call your CarePrecise sales representative at (877) 782-2294.
July 19, 2013
New data on Physicians, Groups and Hospitals
We are delighted to announce that our new Extended Physician, Group and Hospital (EPGH) dataset is in beta release, and is available for CarePrecise subscribers to download. The new data adds rich physician information, including verified hospital and group affiliations and education data, to the popular CarePrecise Access Complete database of U.S. healthcare providers.
Practice groups and hospitals, as well as physicians and other professionals are all inter-linked within the vast relational database representing nearly 4 million healthcare providers in all. But the data is made accessible by CarePrecise's unique compression and record-linkage processing, so that it can be used in popular desktop database software, such as Microsoft Access and FileMaker.
The combined CPAC/EPGH database offers a 360-degree view of U.S. healthcare providers' data, and assimilates in a single database the information contained in the federal NPI database (NPPES), the Medicare database (PECOS), the federal excluded provider database (LEIE), Hospital Compare and Physician Compare databases. It is the only comprehensive source of this data in a single database environment, and it can be used on ordinary laptop and desktop computers with ordinary office database software.
The new EPGH dataset is not available separately, but as an add-on to the CarePrecise Access Complete (CPAC) database of all HIPAA-covered U.S. healthcare providers. Currently in beta release, the EPGH add-on is now available only to current quarterly and monthly subscribers to the CPAC product, pending the full release scheduled for this fall.
To review the fields in the new dataset, see the field list table on the CarePrecise Access Complete documentation page. Standard pricing of CarePrecise data products provides a single-user license; multi-user licenses and derivative product (limited publication) licenses are also available. Contact CarePrecise Sales at (877) 782-2294.
Practice groups and hospitals, as well as physicians and other professionals are all inter-linked within the vast relational database representing nearly 4 million healthcare providers in all. But the data is made accessible by CarePrecise's unique compression and record-linkage processing, so that it can be used in popular desktop database software, such as Microsoft Access and FileMaker.
The combined CPAC/EPGH database offers a 360-degree view of U.S. healthcare providers' data, and assimilates in a single database the information contained in the federal NPI database (NPPES), the Medicare database (PECOS), the federal excluded provider database (LEIE), Hospital Compare and Physician Compare databases. It is the only comprehensive source of this data in a single database environment, and it can be used on ordinary laptop and desktop computers with ordinary office database software.
The new EPGH dataset is not available separately, but as an add-on to the CarePrecise Access Complete (CPAC) database of all HIPAA-covered U.S. healthcare providers. Currently in beta release, the EPGH add-on is now available only to current quarterly and monthly subscribers to the CPAC product, pending the full release scheduled for this fall.
To review the fields in the new dataset, see the field list table on the CarePrecise Access Complete documentation page. Standard pricing of CarePrecise data products provides a single-user license; multi-user licenses and derivative product (limited publication) licenses are also available. Contact CarePrecise Sales at (877) 782-2294.
June 30, 2012
Population Healthcare Is Health Reform
Michael Christopher
Chief Chigger, CarePrecise Technology
We have heard many people say that the Affordable Care Act is not health reform, but an attempt at health insurance reform. But a broad shift in the focus and delivery of healthcare has begun, shaped in part by the ACA, and poised to bring significant change to American healthcare. At the heart of that change is population-based healthcare.
"With the Supreme Court upholding the ACA, we all now understand that population healthcare is what we're all going to be doing going forward," says Dr. Steven Davidson, senior vice president and chief medical informatics officer for New York's Maimonides Medical Center in a June 28 Modern Healthcare article. What is "population healthcare," what does it have to do with the Affordable Care Act, and what does it mean to industry vendors?
The term refers to "the ability to assess the health needs of a specific population; implement and evaluate interventions to improve the health of that population; and provide care for individual patients in the context of the culture, health status, and health needs of the populations" according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Population healthcare is a broadening of focus to see beyond the individual patient to the broad context of that patient's health issues, and to understand the issues of the patient's population to better serve both the individual patient and broader communities of patients.
This perspective becomes ever more critical when cost efficiencies are taken seriously into account, as they must be in an "affordable care" paradigm. In a Tufts Managed Care Institute's white paper on population health, we find
When viewed through the lens of health reform's quality focus, public health data collection and bringing the technologies that enable collection to every point of care, population healthcare is seen as a key - if not the key - strategy for both implementing the provider side of health reform, and rewiring its financial backbone of health insurance.
* Boland P., editor. Redesigning Heath Care
Delivery. Boland Health Care, Berkeley,
1996. pp. 159-163.
** Zeich R. Patient identification as a key to
population health management. New
Medicine. 1998;2:109-116.
Chief Chigger, CarePrecise Technology
We have heard many people say that the Affordable Care Act is not health reform, but an attempt at health insurance reform. But a broad shift in the focus and delivery of healthcare has begun, shaped in part by the ACA, and poised to bring significant change to American healthcare. At the heart of that change is population-based healthcare.
"With the Supreme Court upholding the ACA, we all now understand that population healthcare is what we're all going to be doing going forward," says Dr. Steven Davidson, senior vice president and chief medical informatics officer for New York's Maimonides Medical Center in a June 28 Modern Healthcare article. What is "population healthcare," what does it have to do with the Affordable Care Act, and what does it mean to industry vendors?
The term refers to "the ability to assess the health needs of a specific population; implement and evaluate interventions to improve the health of that population; and provide care for individual patients in the context of the culture, health status, and health needs of the populations" according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Population healthcare is a broadening of focus to see beyond the individual patient to the broad context of that patient's health issues, and to understand the issues of the patient's population to better serve both the individual patient and broader communities of patients.
This perspective becomes ever more critical when cost efficiencies are taken seriously into account, as they must be in an "affordable care" paradigm. In a Tufts Managed Care Institute's white paper on population health, we find
"Population-based care involves a new way of seeing the masses of individuals seeking health care. It is a way of looking at patients not just as individuals but as members of groups with shared health care needs. This approach does not detract from individuality but rather adds another dimension, as individuals benefit from the guidelines developed for the populations to which they belong.* Members with a particular disease must be prioritized so that disease management interventions are targeted toward those members most likely to cost-effectively benefit.**"The Affordable Care Act package as it now stands places the emphasis on results, rather than on specific means to obtain results. Despite what has been said by opponents, providers are given wide freedom in achieving improved quality and reach of care, and are provided with new resources, such as advanced electronic health records, paid for in part by the taxpayer. Population healthcare is a strategy for deploying these resources and creative latitudes, in a package of practical tactics and achievable objectives, and at scale.
When viewed through the lens of health reform's quality focus, public health data collection and bringing the technologies that enable collection to every point of care, population healthcare is seen as a key - if not the key - strategy for both implementing the provider side of health reform, and rewiring its financial backbone of health insurance.
* Boland P., editor. Redesigning Heath Care
Delivery. Boland Health Care, Berkeley,
1996. pp. 159-163.
** Zeich R. Patient identification as a key to
population health management. New
Medicine. 1998;2:109-116.
March 28, 2012
5,000th Application Milestone
In April, 2012, CarePrecise will celebrate having built and released our 5,000th database application and version release! Actually, we will have released 5,049 (and maybe more) separate software applications, including state-by-state NPIdentify Desktop apps, CarePrecise Access sets, customized CarePrecise Select sets, CP ListMaker version upgrades, custom applications, and specialized MEDICAlistings marketing lists. In all, we will have distributed software and datasets representing nearly a terabyte of data and code since 2008. We're a privately held company and we don't release financials or our exact number of users, but we can say that it's between 500 and 1,000. And we love every single one!
July 7, 2011
A Nut Too Tough to Crack?
One of the hardest problems in health IT is the effort to get data from different silos into a centralized database that can be searched as a single dataset. So, this is us announcing our new "linking and shrinking" technology, code named "Squirrel." What does it do?
Squirrel is a record-linkage and deflation system that pulls in data from multiple federal provider databases in various formats, makes them play nice together by linking everything up under providers' NPI numbers, preserves all the data but shrinks the file size down to about 9% of the original size, puts it in a format that can be managed in Microsoft Access or other garden variety database software, downloads it to our customers, and then does it all again fresh every month.
The technology is built on record-linkage methods developed over twenty years. Interesting trivia: The precursor to the current system was built in Microsoft Access 1.0 -- you remember it, the Introductory Package -- in 1992. While we don't share all the secrets, the basic trick involves pattern matching algorithms and a lot of processing time to handle more than 13 million rows of data, comparing each provider's records between all the sources. The end result is called CarePrecise Access.
We just sent out a press release about the whole thing.
Now you'll excuse us, as we have some more nuts to collect and crunch on.
Squirrel is a record-linkage and deflation system that pulls in data from multiple federal provider databases in various formats, makes them play nice together by linking everything up under providers' NPI numbers, preserves all the data but shrinks the file size down to about 9% of the original size, puts it in a format that can be managed in Microsoft Access or other garden variety database software, downloads it to our customers, and then does it all again fresh every month.
The technology is built on record-linkage methods developed over twenty years. Interesting trivia: The precursor to the current system was built in Microsoft Access 1.0 -- you remember it, the Introductory Package -- in 1992. While we don't share all the secrets, the basic trick involves pattern matching algorithms and a lot of processing time to handle more than 13 million rows of data, comparing each provider's records between all the sources. The end result is called CarePrecise Access.
We just sent out a press release about the whole thing.
Now you'll excuse us, as we have some more nuts to collect and crunch on.
November 2, 2010
Federal Physician Comparison Website Coming
CMS has until January 1 to create the new PhysicianCompare.hhs.gov site, intended to make it possible to lookup info on your doctor and compare her quality to that of others. Like HospitalCompare.hhs.gov launched recently, the notion is that these sites will create the incentive for providers to give better care, ultimately helping to control healthcare costs. As required by the Affordable Care Act, CMS has two years to get the site serving up quality data on docs.
Not only must quality data be available to help patients make smarter healthcare purchasing decisions, but the Act requires that the site help physicians to actively use the information to improve quality.
At a five-hour-long Town Hall last week, CMS gathered doctors, hospitals, employers and anyone else who wanted to participate with the goal of getting input on what the site should contain. The outspoken participants told them, among many other things:
And here's a big one: Should physicians' charges be disclosed? How can you make a value decision without prices? Doctors who charge more might offer additional services; what about house calls, or no-wait appointments, or a Personal Health Record (PHR) portal -- should this information be available?
Naturally, the AMA is pushing back a bit. AMA president James Rohack, M.D. told HealthLeaders Media last week that the AMA's concern is that "individual doctor-level data right now is not ready for prime time, especially in complex situations. The attribution of who's really responsible for that care is not worked out." Dr. Rohack said that doctors aren't particularly afraid of being graded: "The reason we became doctors was because we got good grades."
These and many more questions remain to be resolved even before determining exactly what data will be collected -- a step that is mandated to begin in January of 2012. But pulling away the veil of mystery surrounding the work of the physician is long overdue and worthy of the gargantuan task facing CMS. Unless a wing nut Congress repeals or guts the law within the next two years, we will finally be able to look under the hood before making some of the most important and most costly buying decisions of our lives.
Not only must quality data be available to help patients make smarter healthcare purchasing decisions, but the Act requires that the site help physicians to actively use the information to improve quality.
At a five-hour-long Town Hall last week, CMS gathered doctors, hospitals, employers and anyone else who wanted to participate with the goal of getting input on what the site should contain. The outspoken participants told them, among many other things:
- Physician's sex, race and age
- Languages spoken
- Office hours
- Medical degrees and schools
- Hospitals where they have privileges
- How long in practice
- Health networks they belong to
- Awards received
- Community service work/care for the poor
And here's a big one: Should physicians' charges be disclosed? How can you make a value decision without prices? Doctors who charge more might offer additional services; what about house calls, or no-wait appointments, or a Personal Health Record (PHR) portal -- should this information be available?
Naturally, the AMA is pushing back a bit. AMA president James Rohack, M.D. told HealthLeaders Media last week that the AMA's concern is that "individual doctor-level data right now is not ready for prime time, especially in complex situations. The attribution of who's really responsible for that care is not worked out." Dr. Rohack said that doctors aren't particularly afraid of being graded: "The reason we became doctors was because we got good grades."
These and many more questions remain to be resolved even before determining exactly what data will be collected -- a step that is mandated to begin in January of 2012. But pulling away the veil of mystery surrounding the work of the physician is long overdue and worthy of the gargantuan task facing CMS. Unless a wing nut Congress repeals or guts the law within the next two years, we will finally be able to look under the hood before making some of the most important and most costly buying decisions of our lives.
October 18, 2010
Website Compares Hospital Quality
The Commonwealth Fund just launched WhyNotTheBest.org, described as "a free resource for health care professionals interested in tracking performance on various measures of health care quality." Basically, you select some hospitals, choose some measures, and view the report. My first report (see the graphic) showed me that my local major hospitals fell somewhat below the national Top 10 bar, but scored rather well overall. My graphic here shows only an abbreviation of the actual report, which is downloadable in Excel or PDF format.The site includes measures of hospital quality from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services website, Hospital Compare. The data will be updated quarterly. Nearly all U.S. hospitals are included, over 4,500.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)