New Offering Helps Health Plans Dramatically Improve Data Completeness to Better Identify Care Disparities Across Member Populations and Supports New HEDIS® Stratification Requirements
BOWIE, Md., July 13, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Inovalon, a leading provider of cloud-based software solutions empowering data-driven healthcare, today announced a new data enrichment offering that allows health plans to improve the completeness and accuracy of race and ethnicity data for their members. By using algorithms uniquely available through the Inovalon ONE® Platform, the offering fills in information gaps that can lead to care disparities across member populations and helps plans meet new stratification requirements for five Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) measures for measurement year 2022.
Health plans face inherent challenges in directly capturing race and ethnicity data from members such as member distrust, unwillingness to self-identify, or inadequate staff training. These challenges can affect the completeness of population data and hinder efforts to incorporate race and ethnicity data into holistic member-centric care and intervention planning, which can also significantly impact a health plan’s overall quality ratings.
The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) has approved the use of indirect methods by health plans to improve the collection and use of race and ethnicity data to advance health equity efforts. While promising, some indirect methods pose challenges as well. Many health plans do not have the expertise or resources to produce indirect race and ethnicity data enrichment files. Further, tight regulatory reporting timelines prevent health plans from re-surveying their member populations on a regular basis to obtain this data and fill their information gaps.
To address these challenges, health plans can now leverage the Inovalon ONE Platform, available public data sources, and Inovalon’s proprietary algorithms to analyze membership data and produce indirect supplemental membership datasets to enrich their race and ethnicity data. In a recent study of a large not-for-profit health plan, Inovalon’s data enrichment offering helped reduce the percentage of members classified as unknown race from 41.2% to .8% and unknown ethnicity from 100% to 1.8%. This dramatically improved the health plan’s ability to identify care disparities within its member population and comply with new regulatory requirements.
“Lack of specialized expertise and resources make it difficult for health plans to collect member data with the completeness and confidence needed for both compliance and deriving insights,” said Courtney Breece, Associate Vice President of Product at Inovalon. “This new offering lets health plans easily integrate supplemental data in just days, easing compliance and improving analysis and decision-making.”
Customers can easily enable this offering within Inovalon’s comprehensive quality analytics and measurement software solution, QSI-XL®. For more information on this new offering and QSI-XL, please visit https://www.inovalon.com/products/payer-cloud/quality-measurement/.
About Inovalon
Inovalon is a leading provider of cloud-based software solutions empowering data-driven healthcare. The Inovalon ONE® Platform brings together national-scale connectivity, real-time primary source data access, and advanced analytics into a sophisticated cloud-based platform empowering improved outcomes and economics across the healthcare ecosystem. The company’s analytics and capabilities are used by more than 20,000 customers and are informed by the primary source data of more than 68 billion medical events across one million physicians, 594,000 clinical settings, and 348 million unique patients. For more information, visit www.inovalon.com.
Contact:
Whitney Swistock
Sr. Communications Manager, Inovalon
Whitney.Swistock@inovalon.com
Source: https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/07/13/2479134/0/en/Inovalon-Launches-Race-Ethnicity-Data-Enrichment-Offering-as-Part-of-its-QSI-XL-Software-Solution.html