PROFILE: Understanding Healthcare Performance Through Data Transparency
Click here to watch the recording of the Change Agent Chat featuring the Peterson Center’s Executive Director, Jay Want MD, and CIVHC’s CEO, Ana English.
The Peterson Center on Healthcare is a non-profit organization dedicated to making higher quality, more affordable healthcare a reality for all Americans. Using a data-driven, collaborative, and action-oriented approach, the Center is working to transform U.S. healthcare into a high-performance system by finding innovative solutions that improve quality and lower costs, and accelerating their adoption on a national scale.
Project Summary: The Center has spent the last few years developing a better understanding of healthcare spending drivers at the national level. Now, with the Increasing Data Transparency initiative, they are shifting their focus to investigate what drives spending locally. This next phase of work will include exploration of how greater transparency around provider performance can be leveraged to improve healthcare purchasing decisions and care delivery reforms.
The Center hopes the initiative will answer two questions:
- What type of performance measurement frameworks can effectively change purchaser behavior?
- Are there shared measures for both improvement and selection pathways that lead to better performance of the health system?
To encourage adoption of data transparency, the Center plans to work with states with all payer claims databases (APCDs) to determine which measures should be reported to which stakeholders and the most effective method of communication of these measures to minimize unintended consequences (e.g., price shifting, market backlash, etc.). The Center believes that this initiative will help create the evidence base necessary to further data transparency efforts across the nation.
Benefit to Colorado: As one of the states with an APCD, Colorado can greatly benefit from the Center’s project. The investigation into the most meaningful measures for each stakeholder and the best way to communicate the information has the potential to inform how data from the CO APCD is released, ensuring that it is the most actionable and useful. Additionally, increasing data transparency will help Coloradans understand what is driving healthcare costs and inform policies and interventions to contain spending.