Massachusetts Ehealth Collaborative (MAeHc) Quality Data Center (QDC) Gaining Momentum With New Customers And Enhanced Capabilities

Growing Clientele and Innovative Developments Further QDC’s Technology Leadership

The Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative (MAeHC), a non-profit pioneer and leader in healthcare delivery through health information technology, recently announced a number of milestones highlighting the rapid growth of its Quality Data Center (QDC), a fully HIPAA-compliant modular electronic health record (EHR) solution for meeting internal and external clinical reporting requirements. Increased industry demand for the QDC’s premiere online reporting tool has given rise to several new customers, growing partnerships and continued innovative technology developments.

MAeHC has recently started working with new customers looking to utilize the QDC, including the Central Massachusetts Independent Physician Association (CMIPA) and Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH). These organizations benefit from MAeHC’s holistic end-to-end management of quality measurement and reporting. At Boston Children’s Hospital, MAeHC is providing both Eligible Provider (EP) and Eligible Hospital (EH) certified modular EHR services with the QDC to help meet Meaningful Use (MU) Stage 2 reporting requirements. Through a central point of connection, the QDC is able to take in clinical data via a standard CCDA Document or Continuity of Care Document (CCD), which provides the discrete data required to generate both the inpatient (EH) and outpatient (EP) certified measure results for BCH.

With CMIPA, MAeHC is developing care management capabilities across payer-specific care management programs, claims-based utilization management reporting and tracking, and clinical quality measurement (CQM) for EHR data. “MAeHC has been helping us with the unique situation of working with multiple EHRs, all with distinct interface requirements, to ensure that the data we need populates into the QDC so we can execute care management programs,” said Paul Bergeron, MD, Chief Medical Officer, Central Massachusetts Independent Physician Association. “The MAeHC team has acted as a trusted partner throughout the process, working through challenges and identifying the best solutions to fit our needs. We could not accomplish our goal of facilitating connected care without them.”

Along with new clients, MAeHC has also expanded the depth and breadth of services within existing QDC partnerships, including support for care management activities, disease registry requirements and other specific care management needs. Partner organization Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) utilizes the QDC in normalizing, analyzing and reporting its data. In a joint venture with HealthFidelity, MAeHC is now helping the organization to employ a natural language processing methodology to deliver a robust and comprehensive coded clinical problem list for the medical center. This innovative approach, which involves the use of advanced contextual language processing, generates clinically relevant problem lists for providers so they are better able to manage and coordinate care.

“MAeHC has become a trusted partner to our organization, and the QDC has proven invaluable for the time it saves our physicians and staff,” said John Halamka, CIO, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “Since our first transaction, reporting has been fast and accurate, helping us to meet the performance measurement and reporting requirements of a wide range of government, payer and internal quality initiatives.”

MAeHC has also integrated the QDC with ChartLogic, an EHR solution provider. This partnership will allow ChartLogic to provide a certified CQM solution to help clients using its software with MU reporting. “When determining how our solution was going to handle CQM reporting, we realized the value of outsourcing this task to MAeHC. Not only does the QDC help deliver accurate, reliable reports, but the team at MAeHC is always on hand with support and strategic guidance when we need it,” said Mark Wilson, Director of Software Development at ChartLogic. “With the QDC, we are able to handle larger, more robust sets of data, and the ease of integration with our existing system cannot be beat.”

In an effort to provide further value with the QDC, MAeHC has developed claims data integration, which allows for the aggregation of utilization and cost data with clinical quality data to provide combined cost and quality metrics to providers, enhancing efforts in coordination of care and care management. In addition, QDC customers that are participating in the Pioneer ACO program, or will be participating in Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)-sponsored incentive programs that adhere to the standard electronic CQM reporting methods, can now leverage the QDC to report electronically. For 2012 and 2013 Pioneer ACO submission years, the QDC generated electronic measure results for reporting to CMS, saving many hours of manual CQM data collection and aggregation. The standards for electronic submission are complex, require deep analytic capability and explicit electronic specification adherence. The QDC helps makes this reporting process simple.

“We’re excited that the QDC is really taking off, as the complexity of analyzing and reporting data is too big a burden for provider organizations to bear on their own in today’s healthcare environment,” said Micky Tripathi, CEO, Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative. “We are continuing to expand the functionality of the QDC to offload more of these time-consuming processes so that providers can continue to focus on delivering quality care.”

MAeHC delivers hands-on tactical support and sustainable strategies to help providers improve healthcare delivery within their own organizations and across communities. The QDC uniquely helps MAeHC connect communities by providing a comprehensive, on-demand data warehousing solution that seamlessly extracts and aggregates data from multiple clinical systems and provides timely feedback that helps clinical teams improve overall quality. For more information, visit http://www.maehc.org/services/quality-data-services/.

About the Central Massachusetts Independent Physician Association
Formed in 1998 and based in Worcester, Mass., Central Massachusetts Independent Physician Association (CMIPA) is the largest physician group of its kind in the area not affiliated with a hospital. Consisting of almost 200 independent, community physicians with approximately 80 primary care physicians (PCPs) and over 110 specialists (SPSs),CMIPA is responsible for 35,000 patients. Dedicated to the delivery of personalized, compassionate, cost-effective health care, CMIPA believes that choice for physicians and patients is the best way to ensure the highest quality of care.

About Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a patient care, teaching and research affiliate of Harvard Medical School, and currently ranks third in National Institutes of Health funding among independent hospitals nationwide.

BIDMC is in the community with Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital-Milton, Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital-Needham, Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital-Plymouth, Anna Jaques Hospital, Cambridge Health Alliance, Lawrence General Hospital, Signature Health Care, Beth Israel Deaconess HealthCare, Community Care Alliance, and Atrius Health. BIDMC is also clinically affiliated with the Joslin Diabetes Center and Hebrew Senior Life and is a research partner of Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. BIDMC is the official hospital of the Boston Red Sox. For more information, visit www.bidmc.org.

About ChartLogic
ChartLogic 8.1 is a complete, cloud-based EHR system. ChartLogic, founded in 1994, offers medical groups revenue cycle management and a powerful EHR suite which includes electronic medical records, superior billing software, and patient portal. ChartLogic 8.1 is guaranteed to meet meaningful use requirements. For more information, visit www.chartlogic.com.

About Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative (MAeHC)
The Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative is a national leader in the facilitation and management of electronic health record deployment, health information exchange and quality measure reporting. MAeHC is an independent non-profit corporation with a charitable mission to improve the delivery of health care by promoting the use of health IT. Formed in 2004 as a collaboration of non-profit health care stakeholders to demonstrate the most effective ways to deploy EHRs and HIE to improve the quality, safety, efficiency, and affordability of care in Massachusetts, MAeHC now works across the United States with a wide range of physician practices, hospitals, state governments, contracting networks, management services organizations, HIE organizations, technology vendors, and consulting firms. For more information, visit www.maehc.org.