2006 Mid-Year
Major Developments:
NCQA Certification
Complete CA P4P Reporting
Report Carding / Expansion of KPIs
Statistical Significance Flags
New Condition Reports
Enhancements to Benchmarking (C-Series) Reports
Other Changes:
CCS (Diagnostic Grouping)
Documentation Now Available On-Line
ManagedCare.com Invoices Moving to E-mail
Speed Tester / Response Time Management
New Reports (Q-10C, G-Series Reports – for Group-level Physician Profiling)
Error Logging Tools
Upcoming Enhancements:
Batch Printing Utilities
DM Online Tool
Specialist and Employer Dashboards
Claims Query Tool – Version 2
NCQA Certification / CA P4P Reporting
Effective April 28th, ManagedCare.com has been certified under NCQA’s
Limited Software CertificationSM program for production of the 9 California
Pay-for-Performance measures (including both the MCO and PO variations). These measures
include:
- Childhood Immunizations
- Appropriate Treatment for URI
- Breast Cancer Screening
- Cervical Cancer Screening
- Chlamydia Screening
- Cholesterol Management
- Comprehensive Diabetes Care
- Appropriate Asthma Medications
- Colorectal Cancer Screening
This designation will not only allow us to serve our California clients more effectively
(by providing ongoing capture, tracking, reporting, and year-end accumulation of
all administrative P4P data), but will enable us to produce these same measures
– which will inevitably form the center of any national pay-for-performance programs
– for our clients across the Country.
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Report Carding / Expansion of KPIs
Our PCP Report Carding initiative was migrated from beta to “live” production in
February. A number of clients are now producing physician-accessible, customized
report cards that dynamically track their efficiency and quality objectives. In
each case, physicians can log in and view individual profiles through “branded”
links to the client’s web site. These report cards are highly graphical and contain
a broad range of drill-down options to permit physicians to view member-level detail,
including exception lists for quality and disease management measures. The library
of KPIs is expanding rapidly, and we expect to add dozens in the coming months.
We are anxious to assist each of you in the development of customized KPIs and the
design of a complete implementation program. If we’re not already working with you
on this, please contact us and allow us to support your efforts in this area.
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Statistical Significance Flags
As you are aware, many of our report views (especially physician profiles) contain
highlighting logic designed to bring the user’s attention to outlier data. We have
recently integrated more robust measures of statistical significance into our highlighting
logic. For most measures, the highlighting logic is now tied to a judgment at the
90% confidence level (i.e. based on the standard deviation of the underlying data
and the size of the sample, you can be 90% confident that the observed value is
statistically different than the population mean). For additional details, consult
the report glossary or call us directly.
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New Condition Reports
We are adding new disease profiles under the DM/CM Tools tab for otitis media, depression,
osteoarthritis (knee/hip) and allergic rhinitis. As with our low back pain and other
views, these reports were designed in consultation with generally accepted clinical
guidelines available in the public domain. The formats are built to capture key
indicators of the physicians’ compliance with these guidelines. If these views are
not already showing up on your menu bar, they will be added shortly at the next
reporting cycle or interim compile.
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Enhancements to Benchmarking (C-Series) Reports
Many of our standard comparative reports (F-01C, F-04C, F-05C, S-05C, and D-01C)
have been dramatically improved in this month’s cycle. The reports now contain customized
recognition of: a) the unique age/sex composition of each client’s population, and
b) regional comparisons using geographic or other subgroups out of our client universe.
The default setup for these reports (unless we obtain more specific instructions
from the client) will cause non-California clients to be profiled against our “non-California”
region (within the relevant line of business), and California-based clients to be
compared against the balance of the State. Please note that these reports will continue
to present demographically-adjusted national comparisons along side the new regional
profiles.
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CCS (Diagnostic Grouping) Documentation Now Available On-Line
A complete map of individual ICD-9 codes and their associated diagnosis groupers
is now available on the web site. These groupers (developed by AHRQ) are used extensively
throughout our report suite. If you select Administration and CCS Documentation
on the menu bar, you will obtain a complete crosswalk (which may be “screen scraped”
easily into Excel). This same information can also be accessed piecemeal by using
the ICD-9-level drill-down on the D-01 report.
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ManagedCare.com Invoices Moving to E-mail
Beginning May 1st, we will no longer be issuing client invoices via mail.
You will receive the exact same information in the form of an e-mail with a PDF
(Acrobat) attachment. If we do not already have the e-mail address of the primary
billing contact within your organization, you can expect to be hearing from us in
the next week or two.
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Speed Tester / Response Time Management
We have been working to steadily improve the response times that users experience
while accessing our reports. You will note a new button that now appears in the
top of the user interface which reads “PC Pitstop”. This button uses a 3rd
party service to allow you to determine whether any unusual latency that you experience
between report views (3-4 seconds is the current response time for most high-speed
users) is caused by bandwidth issues in your network. The test takes less
than 10 seconds, and if you are obtaining download speed of less than 500 kilobits
per second, you can expect some increases in report load times relative to normal.
Any feedback on your experience that you can provide to the ManagedCare.com team
would be greatly appreciated! This information provides useful insights that help
us constantly improve the interface speeds.
Please note that we are in the process of doubling our upload bandwidth in the next
several weeks. We expect this will provide some modest increases in speed. We also
retain a tracking service that tests our response times several hundred times a
day at different locations around the Country, and we are working with an outside
consultant to identify ways to reduce page load times through more effective packet
routing. Be assured that we will not be satisfied until your report loads are virtually
instantaneous.
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New Reports (Q-10C, G-Series Reports – for Group-level Physician
Profiling)
If you have not already noticed, we have added a comparative view of all the quality
metrics that we currently track – the Q-10C. This report will be undergoing some
slight revisions this month, as we incorporate necessary changes in the programming
code identified during our recent HEDIS certification.
Also, many of you are already receiving group-level presentations of the P-01 (called
the P-01G) and other physician profiles. If you are not, and you have subgroups
of physicians (e.g. independent tax IDs, IPAs or regions) that you’d like profiled
as discrete units, please notify us of your interest here and we’ll get them added
to your report suite.
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Error Logging Tools
As we make changes and enhancements to our programming code, we occasionally create
unforeseen problems. When you as a user experience an error that terminates your
session in the interface, we receive an error logging e-mail that receives immediate
attention from our programming team. While you are of course free to contact
us with any issue, we want you to be aware that we are probably already aware
of the problem, and working toward a rapid fix.
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Batch Printing Utilities
On or about May 12th, we will be adding a utility to the menu bar that
permits the user to simplify the report printing process in two very significant
ways. First, physician reports can be bulk printed (e.g. entire specialty profiles
can be sent to print simultaneously – including report cards). Second, a pre-defined
set of non-contiguous reports can be selected in an input screen and automatically
batched as a single print job.
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DM Online Tool
We are currently programming an on-line application for directing and reporting
on disease management activities. This integrated suite of reports and user information
screens will be added to the DM/CM Tools tab in the next 45-60 days. It will contain
utilities for tracking such diverse topics as EPSDT and chronic diseases such as
diabetes and asthma. It will contain several discrete “environments”, including
both view-only patient summaries and clinical profiles, and entry screens where
users may input and track patient contacts and other related activities. The DM
Online Tool represents a significant extension of our product capabilities – into
the realm of interactive software – and can be expected to evolve steadily over
the course of the coming year.
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Specialist and Employer Dashboards
To date, our dashboarding efforts have been limited exclusively to primary care
presentations. Expect to see specialist report cards and similar presentations of
customizable, employer-level views in the next several months.
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Claims Query Tool – Version 2.0
A more flexible version of the Claims Query Tool, enabling summarized (grouping,
sorting) output data is on the development docket for late summer. This application
will be replacing the current tool, which is limited in its scope to claims-level
output.
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