Collaboration brings analytics to the point of care

Data Diagnostics platform combines an information database with links through EHRs.


An analytics platform is bringing a large database with information on more than 127 million people and integration with nearly 600 electronic health records systems to enable physicians to make better clinical decisions at the point of care.

The collaboration brings together Inovalon and Quest Diagnostics, which are cooperating on the initiative, called Data Diagnostics. Announced in December, Data Diagnostics is attracting interest from accountable care organizations, health plans and provider networks.

The approach relies heavily on real-time links that Quest Diagnostics has with EHRs, says David Freeman, its general manager of information ventures. “We’ve been building connectivity into the EHR environment for the last decade, and we have interfaces into all the primary EHRs that are now in use,” he says, adding that physicians are used to ordering lab tests through records systems. “We’re leveraging that connectivity through Data Diagnostics.”

The approach provides better guidance for physicians at the point of care, says Jason Rose, chief strategic development officer for Inovalon, which provides cloud-hosted analytics based on information from the treatment of 127 million Americans.

Data Diagnostics offers patient-specific data analyses that can be ordered individually on-demand by clinicians at the point of care within their existing workflow prior to or during a patient consult. Each report identifies specific actions the physician may take to improve the patient's care, according to quality, risk, utilization and other metrics and criteria on which financial payment for health services are increasingly determined under value-based reimbursement models.

Examples include identifying a patient who is overdue to receive guideline-recommended cancer screenings, has a higher risk of disease progression or is receiving redundant testing and other unnecessary services. Clinicians also are able to make real-time requests for comprehensive medical histories for first-time patients and those receiving emergency care.

By using the existing Quest platform and linkages to EHRs, it resolves a variety of interoperability issues, Rose says. “It resolves the question of how you get better data into the doctor’s hands. At the end of the day, we want to make sure the doctor has the best, most real-time data available. In pulling this together, any doctor using the top EHR platforms can access that information.”

The approach also is helpful when patients are seeing multiple physicians, who can all draw off the same base of diagnostic knowledge, he added.

“Our customers who use our platform every day are focused on how to manage that patient encounter to make sure the quality of that organization is optimized,” Freeman adds. ”That group of patients needing coordinated care is dramatically increasing.”

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