Live Well San Diego, a comprehensive strategy developed by the San Diego County Health and Human Services Agency to improve community health by leveraging data and engaging stakeholders, has won the State and Local Innovation Prize at the Health Datapalooza in Washington, D.C.
The Milbank Memorial Fund and AcademyHealth announced the prize, which recognizes state and local efforts to improve the health of populations and the performance of health systems.
The two other finalists for the prize were the Medicaid Outcomes Distributed Research Network (MODRN), a partnership between academic institutions and Medicaid agencies in nine states, and New York City Health + Hospitals.
Milbank Memorial Fund said that this year’s finalists each demonstrated the successful application of data analytics roadmaps (DARs) to address important population health analytic challenges—such as defining a population health concept, measuring performance or implementing chronic care improvement strategies —and turn that analysis into information that decision-makers could use to improve health and healthcare.
“State and local health agencies require robust data and analytics for program design, operations, and evaluation,” said Christopher Koller, president of the Milbank Memorial Fund, in a statement. “However, these agencies often struggle to translate that data into useful information. By recognizing the work of these finalists, we hope to offer examples of successful roadmaps from which other communities can learn.”
The finalists’ projects include efforts aimed at leveraging shared data to address the opioid crisis, address chronic disease management in a large safety net system, and coordinate public and private resources to establish and manage community health improvement goals.
Through the Live Well San Diego initiative, the county is coordinating public and private resources and using integrated data from a variety of sources to target specific improvement goals. The Public Health Services Community Health Data Unit gathers, aggregates and analyzes data on key population health characteristics. These data are then assembled into Community Health Profiles that are used by the Live Well Community Leadership Teams to track progress on population health goals identified in the community health improvement plans. By standardizing the measures derived from these various data sources, and making this code publicly available, anyone who has access to comparable data sets could develop similar reports on community health measures.
In a December 2018 interview with Healthcare Innovation Managing Editor Rajiv Leventhal, Nick Yphantides, M.D., the chief medical officer for San Diego County’s medical care services division, said, “We’re looking to really be a data-driven, quantified, and outcome-based environment,” adding “it’s not just about healthcare delivery, but it’s about the context and environment in which that delivery occurs.”
The MODRN partnership is evaluating Medicaid policies to address the opioid crisis. Each state provides Medicaid claims and encounter and eligibility data to its university partners based on a structured format that helps to standardize the data across the states. For this project, MODRN is using the standardized Medicaid data set to study opioid use and treatment patterns based on 20 measures in six areas.
Through MODRN, states can now compare their results on the measures and work with their peers and university partners to develop ideas on how they can reduce opioid use and improve treatment. MODRN addresses data governance and interoperability for Medicaid data; other states can participate in this model and/or replicate the data standards developed by the group.
NYC Health + Hospitals has developed priorities for population health measures and created a dashboard to make information on those measures readily accessible across the system. Measure specifications were derived from a number of national and state sources. Data for these measures are collected from internal systems (EHR, billing and scheduling) as well as external sources (data from Medicaid, corrections and other payers). The Population Health Data Core supports robust data use across the system by increasing data literacy and trust and improving data culture. Overall, the system has achieved improvements in chronic disease management using the population health priority measures. The data strategies, tools, and results have been published in open access publications and shared with peers in other large safety net systems.
