Inovalon’s Big Data Platform Solution Achieves NCQA Measure Certification

BOWIE, Md., March 19 — Inovalon, a leading technology company providing advanced cloud-based data analytics and data-driven intervention platforms to the healthcare industry, today announced that on March 16, 2015, the next generation of big data platform for Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) quality measurement and reporting, Inovalon’s Quality Spectrum Insight (QSI-XL) solution, received National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) Measure Certification for HEDIS 2015.

The QSI-XL platform, the core analytics engine within Inovalon’s HEDIS Advantage solution, leverages big data processing with the industry’s most robust analytics platform available, further enhancing the industry-leading solution utilized by more than two-thirds of the nation’s outsourced quality measurement initiatives. Inovalon’s advanced technology architecture delivers unprecedented processing times that enable accelerated decision-making and speed-to-impact to inform quality analysis and improvement programs – achieving dramatic improvements in data aggregation simplicity and greater than 15 times processing speed capabilities as compared to the company’s previously available industry-leading technologies.

“Inovalon’s advanced cloud-based technologies continue to transform the healthcare industry,” said Joseph Rostock, chief technology officer at Inovalon. “As the industry shifts to quality- and value-based outcome models, the ability to efficiently and rapidly integrate and analyze large sets of data has become increasingly critical for healthcare organizations to be successful. Inovalon drives superior value for our clients by providing the timely, granular insights that health plans, Accountable Care Organizations, provider organizations, and employer groups need to improve quality initiatives, while solving the challenges of volume and disparate sources of healthcare and patient information.”

Prior to the rise in quality-driven care, the aggregation and analysis of quality measurement data was predominantly undertaken on an annual basis – submitted to oversight bodies, state, and federal regulatory agencies to fulfill licensing and accreditation requirements. With the dramatic rise in performance-based incentives across the U.S. healthcare landscape, programs such as the Five-Star Quality Rating System for Medicare Advantage plans, state Medicaid quality programs such as New York’s Quality Assurance Reporting Requirements (QARR) program, the Affordable Care Act’s Quality Rating System (QRS) program, Medicare Shared Savings Program for Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), and a host of other programs, the need for advanced sophistication in quality data aggregation and analysis has risen significantly. These programs now drive billions of dollars in performance incentives. As a result, adjacent constituents of the incentivized market are becoming similarly subject to the same market forces through shared-risk and share-savings agreements. The ultimate impact is broadening the influence of quality- and value-based incentives to extend beyond the health plan marketplace to include hospitals, providers, pharma/life sciences, and even device manufacturers.

Further emphasizing the speed and significance of the market’s transition to quality- and value-based incentives within healthcare, on January 26, 2015, the U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) announced its intention to transition 50 percent of its payments (or approximately $215 billion) to quality-based payments in Medicare by 2018, with even higher percentage goals in the years shortly thereafter.

“Providing the industry’s most robust and widely used quality analytics platform positions Inovalon well to serve its clients and the market in the rapidly expanding need for quality data aggregation and analytics,” said Dan Rizzo, Inovalon’s chief innovation officer. “We believe that the ability for Inovalon to receive massive amounts of data easily within its data lake repository, and process this data in near real-time, providing clients not only with up-to-date insights into their patients, provider and population quality status, but also to serve as a critical element of their quality improvement program, is truly unique in the marketplace.”

Built upon Inovalon’s QSI engine, Inovalon’s HEDIS Advantage platform performs the analytics for more than 1200 Interactive Data Submission System (IDSS) submissions annually for leading health plans across the U.S. to the NCQA, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Utilization Review Accreditation Commission (URAC), and other state regulatory agencies. The majority of HEDIS Advantage users access these capabilities via Inovalon’s cloud-based platform, with the balance of users leveraging installed software versions. As of the date of this release, QSI-XL is already in place and operating with healthcare organization’s NCQA HEDIS reporting and quality improvement programs. Going forward, both QSI and QSI-XL solutions will be offered by Inovalon with clients selecting their desired platform based on dataset size and compute speed needs.

In addition to supporting client needs in quality data aggregation and analytics, the QSI-XL engine will replace QSCL, Inovalon’s prior-generation big data quality measurement platform, as a critical component of Inovalon’s predictive analytics platform, Star Advantage, which identifies future gaps in quality and optimal venue, timing, modality, and content for resolving such identified gaps in quality through the utilization of Inovalon’s data-driven intervention platform. With Inovalon’s arsenal of cloud-based quality analytics tools, clients have the ability to uniquely understand and improve their quality score in near-real time – a capability that has demonstrated improved quality rates by 300 percent compared to populations unaided by such a technology.

The QSI-XL engine additionally enables the application of customer analytical modules, created through Inovalon’s proprietary Quality Spectrum Flowchart Designer (QSFD), across massive datasets at dramatically accelerated speeds. QSFD allows non-technologists to design proprietary algorithms through easy-to-use “drag and drop” graphical interfaces, compiling logic routines for application within the cloud, minutes after creation. These capabilities allow a diverse array of data-users, from internal product designers to device manufactures and pharma/life science researchers, to design unique analysis and apply them against Inovalon’s large-scale datasets in seconds and minutes.

In addition to the NCQA Measure Certification received by Inovalon’s QSI-XL big data quality analytics engine on March 16^th, 2015, Inovalon’s Quality Spectrum Insight (QSI) software engine (version 18) has also received NCQA Measure Certification for HEDIS 2015. Inovalon’s QSI software engine has now received NCQA’s Measure Certification for HEDIS every year, since 2001. Going forward, both QSI and QSI-XL solutions will be offered to Inovalon’s clients.

NCQA is an independent, not-for-profit organization dedicated to improving health care quality. NCQA accredits and certifies a wide range of health care organizations and manages the evolution of HEDIS, the performance measurement tool used by more than 90 percent of the nation’s health plans. HEDIS is a registered trademark of the NCQA.