NEWS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Astrata, Inc

October 11, 2022 

Partnership focused on developing Astrata’s solutions supporting healthcare organizations executing CMS and NCQA’s Digital Quality programs 

PITTSBURGH, PA — Astrata has engaged two former NCQA executives, Rick Moore (MTC Group) and Michael Barr (MEDIS) to offer advisory and consulting services, informing and optimizing Astrata’s product strategy for Digital Quality solutions for healthcare organizations.

Astrata is leveraging Moore and Barr’s extensive experience and expertise to ensure Astrata’s best-of-breed technology solutions are aligned with the future of Quality and Measurement for health care.

“We are thrilled with this opportunity to assist Astrata in its mission to power value-based care by transforming healthcare quality measurement,” said Rick Moore, Founder/CEO of MTC Group, LLC.  “As CMS and NCQA continue to drive the industry towards measuring quality across populations and transitioning to digital measurement, health plans will need to utilize innovative technology solutions to make this possible.”

“Transitioning to prospective HEDIS® and digital measurement play a critical role as health plans continue to improve care quality while advancing value-based care and population health initiatives,” said Rebecca Jacobson, President, Astrata.  “It is also a challenging transformation for health plans, and our partnership with MTC and MEDIS ensures that our technology solutions are best positioned to accelerate this journey.”

In addition to its purpose-built Natural Language Processing (NLP) solutions for HEDIS®, Astrata offers an NCQA certified native FHIR/CQL solution set for quality improvement and digital measurement. Both solutions are positioned to move health plans to prospective quality measurement based on clinical as well as claims data.

“Astrata has leveraged its quality domain expertise to develop and offer world-class NLP and digital measurement products for the health plans,” said Michael Barr, President & Founder, MEDIS, LLC.   “Their track record of success to-date, including increasing gap closure processing speed by 760% on average, is very exciting and offers significant value potential for health plans.  We look forward to assisting their efforts to move health plans from reactive to proactive quality measurement.”

About Astrata:

Astrata is a digital quality company specializing in NLP and advanced analytics. Astrata’s mission is to transform the way the industry measures healthcare quality using proven, HEDIS-specific NLP tools and the first FHIR-native HEDIS engine. A spin-off of UPMC, Astrata guides customers in planning and implementing digital quality initiatives that increase efficiency, cut costs, and use data effectively to improve population health. For more information, visit www.astrata.co.

About MTC & MEDIS:

MTC Group LLC and MEDIS LLC were founded independently by two former executives from NCQA: Michael S. Barr, MD, MBA, MACP, FRCP (MEDIS, LLC) and Rick Moore, PhD (MTC Group, LLC). They led and supervised HEDIS operations from measure development to measure certification, audit, reporting, and publication of benchmarks. As Executive Vice President (Michael) and Chief Information Officer (Rick), they  worked to advance NCQA’s digital quality measurement (DQM) strategy to transform measures using Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) and Clinical Quality Language (CQL). Rick also created NCQA’s Data Aggregator Validation Program (DAV) to support validation of clinical data for use in HEDIS reporting. Prior to NCQA, Dr. Barr was Chief Medical Officer of Baltimore Medical System, Inc., of a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) in Baltimore before joining the American College of Physicians (ACP) in 2005. He co-authored the ACP policy paper promoting the “advanced medical home” and subsequently led ACP’s advocacy for the patient-centered medical home (PCMH). Michael and Rick are both United States Air Force veterans and have extensive leadership and executive experience (over 30 years each).

Media Contact:

Chris Jones

Vice President, Business Development

jonesc@astrata.co

484.986.8206

www.astrata.co