An increasing number of health information exchanges (HIEs) are re-inventing themselves by layering increasingly sophisticated analytics and reporting tools on top of their data aggregation platforms. One example is HealtheConnections, an upstate New York HIE that has created an analytics tool to help its members with the conversion to value-based care arrangements.
“We recognized quite a few years ago that HIE intermediary services are going to become a commodity,” said Bob Krenitsky, the chief technology officer of HealtheConnections, New York state’s regionally largest organization of its kind, spanning 26 counties. “To stay relevant in the marketplace, we really needed to sit down with participants and find out how we could provide more value to them going forward. The clear message was that they needed support in the changing healthcare environment, especially around use of the data, curation of the data, and quality of the data and analytics.”
“We saw the myData analytics tool as an extension of the HIE platform. We identified a need to build an application to help provider customers get them ready for value-based payment systems and quality measurement,” said Rob Hack, president and CEO of HealtheConnections. “We wanted to make data available to them that is actionable and built on a foundation of quality measurement. If you want to look at poor A1C control, we provide a dashboard and patient panel based on that certified quality measure.”
The myData tool is being used to pilot quality measures in a State Innovation Model (SIM) Grant that involves practices participating in New York state’s version of a patient-centered medical home project.
Don Lee, the HIE’s director of business development, said that since HeatlheConnections has the data and has been investing heavily in addressing data quality issues, it has a big step up on any application trying to do the same thing. “Looking across the community, we could see a bunch of providers, especially the smaller, less sophisticated ones that don’t have a ton of resources, have a need for these tools but not a means to get them,” he said. “We saw that we could have an impact by creating a tool that we could put in the hands of these smaller practices, tools they could only otherwise get by joining with a bigger health system.”
The tool was built by deeply customizing a data quality product from one of the vendors HealtheConnections works with. “I would call it a hybrid application,” Hack said. “It has some elements of one of our vendors, but we have built an awful lot around it to ensure it can do the things we want it to do.”
Hack said the patient-centered medical home project fits the mold of what the HIE was already working to do. “We wanted to provide their data back to physicians as well as the broader community data they have access to through patient consent. We want them to understand where their patients are going. Every provider thinks they are keeping their patients in a catchment area, but actually the patients are going elsewhere.”
One goal of the one-year pilot is to identify the best way to utilize the HIEs across the state in support of quality measurement at the state level, but also in support of multiple payers, Krenitsky explained. “They are trying to get interest from payers across the state to work with this project. Part of the project will be to move data from the HIEs on behalf of our participants to the health plans so they can do their quality measurement reporting. Over the course of the project, the goal is to demonstrate the value of the HIEs and SHIN-NY in support of health plans in their value-based care efforts, using PCMH as a model.”
The tool is now in a controlled or limited release. “We have identified 10 to 12 practices we are working with right now just to get it in the field and get them to provide feedback,” Hack said. General release is going to happen later this month for any participant who wants the tool.
In its central and northern regions HealtheConnections has over 900 participating organizations, and in the Hudson Valley region it has another 400. “We are going to make this tool available in the next six months to any of the providers we support,” Hack added. “We recognized that we have a lot of small providers and small rural hospitals that just don’t have the IT experience or money to support data reporting tools,” he said. “A lot of the smaller EHR players don’t have good analytics or data warehouse tools. That is the gap we are trying to fill.”
