Data Portal Could Improve Healthcare on Louisiana Medical News

Data Portal Could Improve Healthcare

By: TED GRIGGS

The Louisiana Health Care Quality Forum has established an online data warehouse that supporters believe will help providers, employers, insurers and policymakers improve healthcare by analyzing the available and quantifiable information.

"I think one of the biggest weaknesses of our system in Louisiana is a lack of good data," said Alan Levine, secretary of the state Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH). "When trying to make policy decisions, it's important for us to know a lot more about the performance of our system than we know today."

Levine said one of the interesting things the Quality Measurement Analysis Portal, or Quality MAP, has shown is that some parts of the state have a higher cardiac catheterization rate than others.

The data can help stakeholders figure out why medicine is practiced differently in different regions, which is critical to making good quality decisions, Levine said.

Dr. Michael Fleming, president of the Louisiana Health Care Quality Forum (LHCQF), said numerous studies have proven that improving healthcare quality leads to lower costs.

"If we focus on improving the quality we're going to get where we want to be for all the stakeholders," Fleming said.

The Quality MAP includes 2005 claims information for 2.3 million Louisiana residents, including Medicare and Medicaid recipients and BlueCross BlueShield of Louisiana policyholders. The identifying information for those residents has been removed. Those accessing the data can find information on a variety of quality measures, utilization of services and costs of care. The data can be organized by region or by patient demographic, and it can be viewed by anyone with Internet access.

"Anybody can look at this," Fleming said. "Whether it be a physician or whether it be policymaker or a person who wants to know, 'Am I getting the best quality of care where I live?'"

As the information is updated, the Quality Forum is hoping more people will want to see it, Fleming said. He is hoping the media will latch onto the data warehouse and use it, which will help raise awareness that the information is available.

Fleming said the data warehouse is one of the country's first, and the Quality MAP established a baseline for quality measures.

"Unfortunately, we pretty much know that we are at the bottom of the heap," Fleming said.

For many years, Louisiana has ranked at or near the bottom in measures of quality by healthcare experts and organizations, such as the Commonwealth Fund and the Kaiser Family Foundation, Fleming said. The LHCQF believes that its data warehouse will help stakeholders track the results of changes and, it is hoped, improvements to the healthcare system.

Levine said one of the reasons the state Legislature established the Quality Forum was so that data could be collected and analyzed and better decisions made.

The idea was to make policy decisions based on evidence rather than anecdotes, Levine said. DHH wants the Quality Forum to collect as much data as it can and analyze it, and give policymakers quality trends for decision making.

The Legislature originally provided the Quality Forum with $1 million in funding. The group used some of that money, a grant from BlueCross and support from Tulane University to hire Health Dialog to create the data warehouse.

Fleming said the Quality Forum hopes to update the claims data each year, but annual updates and maintaining the data warehouse are expensive.

The annual cost to update the claims data is estimated at $350,000 to $500,000 a year and maintaining a statewide, multi-payor database will cost $800,000 to $1 million, he said. The Quality Forum is discussing updates with insurers and healthcare providers and would like to post the 2006 data in the next several months, with the 2007 information as quickly as possible after that.

Fleming expects a growing number of providers and insurers will participate in the data warehouse.

One thing about quality is that it helps all of the stakeholders, he said.

"If we improve quality, we improve care, and that's been proven all over the country," Fleming said. "If we improve quality, it benefits patients and employers because quality has been proven to lower the cost of care."

At present, the Quality Forum is seeking funding from outside groups, Fleming said.

It's too early to say whether the Quality Forum's efforts will receive a boost under President Barack Obama's administration, Fleming said. However, one of Obama's campaign planks was improving healthcare quality and outcomes.

For more information on the Quality MAP, go to www.lhcqf.org/project-overview.html.