IMAT Solutions Helps CCNC Improve Data Accessibility and Quality
IMAT Solutions Helps CCNC Improve Data Accessibility and Quality to Better Serve Participating Physicians and Patients
Community Care of North Carolina, Inc. (CCNC) has implemented IMAT Foundation Services to support its 14 regional networks and 1,820 participating primary care practices to improve in five key areas: data availability, data conversion, data quality, data normalization, and results output and analysis.
Data Availability:
Prior to implementing IMAT, CCNC required their community participants to provide their data in HL7 format, as that was the only format their systems could accept. Now CCNC can accept almost any file format, including CSV, CCD and CCDA. Additionally, using IMAT tools, CCNC can quickly ascertain how many records are available and what fields those records contain. By providing CCNC with information about its data and enabling rapid access to all of the records, CCNC can leverage its data in new ways, such as calculating the cardiovascular risk scores utilized under the Stroke Prevention Grant.
Data Conversion:
CCNC used to receive data in HL7 format, then convert it to XML for loading into the database. With the implementation of IMAT, conversion time has been reduced from the previous run time of four to five hours per batch to less than 30 minutes per batch.
Data Quality:
CCNC formerly ran a quality assurance process on each batch of data. With IMAT in place, CCNC has automated that step, reducing the time required for quality assurance checks from three to four hours per batch to under an hour.
Data Normalization:
Rather than spend two to three days running Vlookups and creating mappings for every variation in spacing, misspelling, and extraneous characters. CCNC can now handle the same task in under four hours, while adding unit conversions, calculated values, code set look-ups, and other data enrichment steps. Using IMAT, CCNC can accept data from many different EMRs, and normalize that data to provide consistent, standardized quality dashboards for primary care practices across the state.
Data Output:
Output scripts could take four to five hours to run. Entire batches were often interrupted because of an issue with a single record. With IMAT, batches of data can be converted to most any standard output format in under 30 minutes. Individual records can be accepted or rejected without delaying the entire batch.
By ingesting data from almost all sources used in the medical industry (EHRs, labs, imaging centers, physician notes and dictation transcripts), standardizing and validating that data for accuracy, then making it available in interoperable formats, CCNC will be able to reduce errors and increase staff productivity. Benefits to the CCNC user community include reducing search and analysis time to gain patient treatment insights, looking for trends, and reporting on outcomes and measures.
“Our goal is to bring actionable insights to the point-of-care, not just bring clinicians more data,” said Frank Jackson, Chief Information Officer for CCNC. “Smarter data use has the potential to drive better and more efficient care, improve outcomes and reduce costs. IMAT is a state-of-the-art tool for getting the most out of our data and improving population health management.”
Kurt Garbe, CEO of IMAT Solutions, commented, “Full data interoperability is one of the chief issues in the healthcare industry today. In order to succeed in a value-based healthcare system, an organization must have access to ALL pertinent data in formats which every necessary part of the system can use. With IMAT, CCNC gains that access and will be prepared to pursue additional innovations and goals in the future.”
About Community Care of North Carolina, Inc.
Through community-based, public-private partnerships, CCNC provides population management and supports “medical homes” for 1.4 million Medicaid beneficiaries, individuals eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid, privately insured employees and uninsured people. CCNC, Inc. is working to bring the benefits of population management and medical homes to other states and populations while expanding resources available to the organization in pursuit of its charitable mission.
Learn more: www.communitycarenc.com
About IMAT Solutions
IMAT Solutions is a new, disruptive medical data management and decision support company. Every day, our software processes tens of millions of records to help 31,000 healthcare professionals working for 2,000 Health Information Exchanges, Accountable Care Organizations, Medical Homes, hospitals and clinics to provide the best possible healthcare to almost 20 million patients. Based on patented technology, IMAT has been developed to address the ever more complex and demanding needs of today’s healthcare providers and practitioners. Our product is based on a completely new approach to ingesting, storing and processing massive amounts of structured and unstructured data from EHRs, lab results, physician notes, transcripts, ADTs and letters. This patented design delivers disruptive speed, superior data accuracy, easy to use charting, reports and queries and is highly cost-effective.