Opportunity
Together with the Center for Improving Value in Health Care (CIVHC) and our partner NORC at the Univeristy of Chicago, we rebuilt the infrastructure of the Colorado all-payer claims database to increase the accuracy and timeliness of the data. CIVHC can now more rapidly produce data-driven insights and fulfill custom data requests aimed at improving health and healthcare.
Approach
High-quality data collection, storage and analysis
Along with our partner NORC, we served as the data warehouse vendor for Colorado’s all-payer claims database (APCD) for CIVHC. APCDs are valuable tools for health care transformation, and the Colorado APCD provides insights into the health of Coloradans and enables analysis of the state’s healthcare utilization, quality, outcomes, and cost. The data can be used to support decision making, policy development, and research—all while protecting patient privacy.
Our team expanded the overall CO APCD infrastructure, capacity, and function. First, we migrated existing data from a previous vendor to a new state-of-the-art warehouse structure. The system we devised provides secure, high-quality data collection and aggregation, as well as warehousing and analytics. It also supports the data release process by fulfilling requests for data from a variety of users.
We also made substantial improvements to the data validation process by providing a mechanism that provides immediate feedback to health plan payers upon submission, increasing accuracy and timeliness.
HSRI led the project, performing core project management, reporting and quality assurance functions in addition to developing web platforms and user interfaces for the system. NORC is responsible for the core engineering and maintenance of the warehouse infrastructure and hosts the system as a part of its secure Data Enclave.
The results
CIVHC, HSRI, and NORC have made substantial improvements to the Colorado APCD. Together, we’ve been able to:
- Increase the core group of commercial payers by nearly 20% to just over 10 million claims.
- Increase the volume of inpatient claims data by nearly 50%.
- Develop custom logic that accurately identifies and removes duplicates from the dataset.
- Expand the dataset to 650,000,000 medical and pharmacy claims.
Impact
With improved data intake and warehousing processes and more comprehensive and robust analytics for its APCD, CIVHC is now able to provide more timely data and analysis to constituents.