New Vendor Selected to Manage Data Intake and Processing for Colorado's All Payer Claims Database

DENVER - July 28, 2016 - PRLog -- This morning, Center for Improving Value in Health Care (CIVHC) announced a new vendor for data intake, management, and analytics for the Colorado All Payer Claims Database (CO ACPD).

Human Services Research Institute (HSRI) and sub-contractor NORC at the University of Chicago are partnering with CIVHC to manage and analyze the millions of claims that come into the CO APCD each month. The team brings invaluable expertise and extensive hands-on experience gained through managing Maine's APCD data and warehouse and many other national and regional health care data and analytic initiatives.

The CO APCD is a secure database containing over 510 million health insurance claims from 21 commercial health insurance companies, Medicare, Medicare Advantage, and Health First Colorado (Colorado's Medicaid Program). CIVHC serves as the administrator of the CO APCD through appointment by the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing (HCPF).

"CIVHC's goal is to make information from the CO APCD as meaningful and actionable as possible. This means we need to excel not only with taking in claims from the payers, but also in processing and turning that information around quickly so stakeholders can use it to implement new programs and initiatives," stated Ana English, CIVHC president and CEO. "We've spent the past year rigorously evaluating and vetting vendors and believe HSRI and NORC will help us discover new ways of looking at the data and make outputs from the database more readily available and meaningful for Colorado."

Planned improvements to the CO APCD include streamlined data intake, tracking, and processing. The new intake and verification processes will result in CIVHC's ability to rapidly produce public data insights as well as custom data requests aimed at improving health, health care, and lowering costs.

Additionally, the HSRI/NORC team will be refreshing the data in the CO APCD faster - 30-days as opposed to the current 90-day refresh cycle. The new cycle will allow CIVHC to provide timelier CO APCD data to all stakeholders; from consumers searching for price information to researchers seeking answers to important health care research topics. Validation of the data upon intake and immediate feedback to health plan payers upon submission will ensure that the claims submitted to the CO APCD are as accurate and complete as possible.

Once claims are taken in, validated, and processed by the HRSI/NORC team, their job is to make sense of the claims through data analytics. The team will also be helping CIVHC build new data displays for the public website www.comedprice.org, as well as an increased number of standard reports available to a wide array of custom data requestors interested in evaluating similar cost, quality, and health data from the CO APCD.

HSRI and NORC will be bringing updated and cutting-edge data warehousing technologies such as HP Vertica to the CO APCD, resulting in better data warehousing performance and enhanced data discovery capabilities.

HSRI's experience managing Maine's APCD and NORC's highly regarded NORC Data Enclave® and its health care analytics experience not only brings first-hand experience to CIVHC and the CO APCD, but also opens up exciting possibilities for national collaboration. "Our new partnership with HSRI/NORC will allow us to more readily leverage the learning and best practices of not only Maine's APCD but other regional and national initiatives," added English. "Using the best of both these vendors under one collaborative arrangement will take our multi-state APCD sharing capabilities to a whole new level."

The contract with HSRI and NORC was effective July 1, 2016. CIVHC's contract with the current vendor goes through June of 2017 to allow ample time to transition the extensive database and analytic platforms to the new vendor.

Visitwww.civhc.org for more information.

About CIVHC

CIVHC (civhc.org) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that helps Colorado identify ways to pay for, deliver and select high value health care. Through the pioneering Colorado All Payer Claims Database, we offer the state's most comprehensive health care cost, quality and utilization claims data. We unlock information and provide tools and insights that guide meaningful action to improve health, enhance quality and lower cost. Bringing together a broad spectrum of organizations and individuals to design and drive collective change, CIVHC is devoted to a single cause: advancing an exceptional health care system for Colorado.