Moving the needle with Digital Quality: Practical Advice from Industry Insiders-August 15th-3:00 EST
April 20, 2021 | AI and NLP, Star Ratings, Year Round Prospective HEDIS®
Year Round Prospective HEDIS® With Astrata
Instead of spending most of their time reviewing thousands of negative cases, your abstractors can spend almost all of their time closing gaps.
Is your organization contemplating the move to prospective, year-round HEDIS® on hybrid measures during the off-season? If so, you’ve probably been doing a lot of math. With the enormous number of gaps to close across even a moderate-sized population, the economics don’t add up. Using our current-sized abstraction team to work during the off-season might not make a dent. How can we afford the additional abstraction costs? Is it really possible to scale prospective reviews across an entire population?
Drum roll please….we have bad news and good news.
Rebecca Jacobson, MD, MS, FACMI
Co-Founder, CEO, and President
Bad News First…
No, your methods and process for HEDIS® Sample Season won’t scale across your entire population. The math is working against you. It would take a 5-abstractor team nearly 1,000 days to review every closeable gap for a moderately-sized population.
| YEAR ROUND HEDIS® MATH (NO TECHNOLOGY) | |
| Number of charts to review | 500,000 |
| Estimated number of gaps to close | 50,000 |
| Average number of charts reviewed per abstractor per day | 100 |
| Abstractor days to close all gaps | 500,000/100 = 5,000 |
| Number of abstractors on the team | 5 |
| Number of days for the team to close all gaps | 5,000/5 = 1000 Yikes! |
Now the Good News…
Yes — it’s absolutely possible to do prospective, year-round reviews on hybrid measures with lightning efficiency, even scaling across entire populations. But your team will need to work in a very different way: using a technology-enabled platform. That’s where Astrata’s technology comes in.
The answer is simple – let our HEDIS®-focused natural-language processing software read the medical record first. Our Chart Review product will tell your abstractors which cases they should prioritize because they have enough information to close the gap. And it will help them get to HEDIS®-required evidence in the medical record in just a few clicks. Instead of spending most of your time reviewing thousands of negative cases, your abstractors will spend almost all of their time closing gaps. Studies of real HEDIS® abstractors have shown that they are able to close between 6 and 38 times the number of gaps per hour using our platform. Math looking better? Improve your rates throughout the year, get topsight into difficult measures with time to intervene, and reduce the stress of sample season.
| YEAR ROUND HEDIS MATH (WITH ASTRATA) | |
| Number of charts to review | 500,000 |
| Number of charts Astrata flagged for review | 55,000 |
| Estimated number of gaps to close | 50,000 |
| Average number of charts reviewed per abstractor per day | 100 |
| Abstractor days to close all gaps | 55,000/100 = 550 |
| Number of abstractors on team | 5 |
| Number of days for team to close all gaps | 550/5 = 110 Now we’re talking! |
Reduce the Abrasion
Your providers will be happy to see better rates, but not at the cost of constant interruptions to their work for additional documentation. If you’re already experiencing provider abrasion with HEDIS®, you won’t want the abrasion to scale with your record review. Astrata technology helps you separate cases where you have all the evidence to close the gap (we call those Hits) from those where you have some but not all the evidence (we call those Leads). For example, a member with an IMA gap has a telemedicine note on 4/6/2021 that says “Menveo vaccine – COMPLETED 4/6/21”. Astrata’s software knows vaccines cannot be administered via telephone/telehealth visits, so it would call this a Lead. Abstractors can filter for Leads by provider, and focus provider outreach on high-priority cases where they can make an impact while skipping the cases that are obviously hits or exclusions.
Use One Platform
If your organization is already thinking strategically about collecting quality data to support your value-based care arrangements and maximize your quality incentive payments, then you are likely already thinking about how to centralize clinical data for prospective HEDIS®. Astrata provides the platform you need to integrate this data and create one consistent view across the multitude of different medical record systems.
Get the Big Picture
Year-round HEDIS® is all about prioritizing. How many gap-closing opportunities do I have across all my measures and populations? Will closing exclusions help or hurt my rates? Where should I start first? Astrata’s technology and consulting practice helps you answer those questions. Pull your own Opportunity Reports and set yourself up for success with a population-level analysis of remaining Hits, Leads, and Exclusions in your system. Now you can prioritize and plan, with the confidence that you’re maximizing the value your year-round team can produce.
Optimize
The future of Astrata’s technology will go even further to help you optimize your prospective abstraction using a wide range of features, now fully under your control. Our Optimize product is expected to be released at the end of 2021, helping you prioritize measures with lower rates, greater risk to your Star ratings, or more benefit in achieving your health equity goals. Soon, you’ll be able to implement your strategic goals and see them translated immediately into workflow.