Amy Krane
Sr. Director, HIE Strategy and Solutions
Nearly a decade ago, Diameter Health began its journey partnering with Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) to achieve our mission of making data universally accessible, organized, and actionable for better health and a more efficient healthcare system. At that time, HIEs were the only entities that had a high enough volume of clinical data on which to prove out a scalable tool for multi-source data aggregation and semantic normalization. Today, Diameter Health technology has unmatched speed and scale, with sub-second processing time for individual clinical documents and over two million documents daily per customer. We have ingested millions of patient records for upwards of 160 million individuals to date through our Upcycling Data™ technology. We owe much of that scalability to our HIE partners.
Federal funding under the HITECH Act was a down payment on HIE infrastructure. HIEs are now responsible for delivering strategic value to their participants for continued sustainability. To meet that challenge, our HIE partners are delivering innovative solutions built on a foundation of high-quality clinical data. Additionally, market forces are reinforcing the critical role of HIEs as health data utilities and aggregators in a connected healthcare ecosystem:
- Federal mandates for interoperability, anti-blocking, and data sharing, including TEFCA, QHINs, and the use of FHIR and the USCDI, reinforce the need for expertise in patient data exchange
- Consumerism and competition, which is forcing payers and providers to think about how to use the data that HIEs make available to deliver targeted services and personalized experiences
- The evolution of health insurers into care orchestrators rather than simply payers, which demands that they have, and use, timely clinical data for their members
- The sheer volume of digital health data that is being generated and exchanged, with a growth rate of 868% since 2016, means its an asset that can no longer be ignored
In the face of these market forces and the need for sustainable business models, our customers are leveraging Upcycled Data as a strategic asset for deployment in care coordination, HEDIS/quality, risk adjustment, public health, payer to payer, and patient access use cases among others.
Diameter Health’s Fusion technology for Upcycling Data – that is, making clinical data interoperable and actionable – is a critical component of a best-of-breed HIE tech stack. Fusion integrates via API with data lakes and workflow tools and can produce data fit for a variety of purposes from a single source of truth. For example, Upcycled Data can be generated from multi-source Continuity of Care Documents (CCDs) or HL7v2 messages and delivered as real-time FHIR resources or longitudinal, summarized patient records.
Here are just a few of the ways in which HIEs are delivering on their missions of driving better health outcomes and supporting their members, in partnership with Diameter Health:
- Care coordination. HIEs deliver hundreds of thousands of multi-source longitudinal health records to hospitals, practices, and providers in their service areas to assist with targeted care coordination. These records consist of aggregated, upcycled and deduplicated clinical data generated by Diameter Health’s Fusion technology, presented in a single summarized patient record. These display diagnoses, test results, vitals, and other clinical data elements from multiple encounters, while eliminating duplicative information and bloat that obscure important facts and create inefficiencies in the care management workflow.
- Public health system modernization and disease reporting. HIEs played a critical role in pandemic response. Diameter Health’s automated and scalable technology for data quality improvement and monitoring has been implemented as part of COVID-19 response efforts as well as for ongoing public health initiatives. In one of the nation’s largest states, Diameter Health partners with an HIE on a COVID reporting system that has processed as many as one million lab tests per day. Our upcycling automatically normalizes and enriches lab results so that they can be rapidly deployed for analysis and interventions.
- NCQA Data Aggregator Validation and HEDIS reporting. Diameter Health is a Certified Data Partner for NCQA’s program, producing conformant CCDs for HEDIS and quality reporting. By selecting Diameter Health as their data partner, HIEs are achieving data stream validation under this rigorous program at lower risk and with fewer resources.
- Improving clinical data quality at the source. Using Diameter Health’s technology to monitor data quality, HIEs act as a “watchdog” in terms of clinical data completeness and syntax. Insights generated from our Data Dashboard identifies data gaps and patterns of poor data quality. As an example, a particular data stream might be missing demographics such as race and ethnicity because of issues with how data is captured or documented in an EHR or lab system. Our HIE customers can identify issues in real time, and flag them for the submitter to address, improving the quality of data going forward.
- FHIR-based applications including Patient Access and Payer to Payer. As organizations prepare to comply with government mandates, including Patient Access and Payer to Payer Data Exchange, HIEs are expanding their services to include FHIR data and solutions. Diameter Health technology offers real-time conversion of Upcycled legacy clinical data to the FHIRr4 standard. For example, one leading HIE has developed a complete solution for health plans to comply with the CMS Patient Access API mandate, with Diameter Health’s upcycling and market leading FHIR conversion capabilities at the core of the solution.
We’ve made great achievements in data interoperability over the last decade because of our constant collaboration with HIEs. We are excited about the what the next decade will bring!
Headed to the Civitas 2022 Annual Conference, taking place on August 21-24 in San Antonio, TX? Visit Diameter Health in booth #45 or book an appointment here. If you’re interested in learning more about how leading HIEs are succeeding with Diameter Health, contact us.
#Together4Health
