Inovalon Collaborates with NCQA in the Improvement of Healthcare Quality Measures

BOWIE, Md., Feb. 19, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Inovalon Inc., a leading provider of data-driven healthcare solutions, today announced that National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), the organization that maintains the Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS^®) has expanded its engagement with Inovalon. This continues Inovalon's support of NCQA's efforts to develop new measures of healthcare quality commissioned by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

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Inovalon's Statistical Research Team has been engaged to assist NCQA through the use of its Medical Outcomes Research for Effectiveness and Economics Registry (MORE² Registry^®), a comprehensive database containing more than six billion healthcare events from over 85 million unique de-identified individuals distributed throughout the United States. Inovalon will apply its extensive analytic capabilities to validate and test statistical models that NCQA is developing to evaluate and compare health plan's all-cause hospital readmission rates. Subsequently NCQA and Inovalon will turn their attention to the task of defining and testing a new measure, based on ambulatory care sensitive hospital admissions to identify potentially avoidable hospitalizations.

Many hospital readmissions are costly events that may be associated with breakdowns in the quality of hospital or transitional care and thus are receiving increasing attention as a largely avoidable source of poor quality of care and excessive spending. In 2012, an Inovalon study published in the American Journal of Managed Care found the 30-day readmission rate for Medicare Advantage plans was 14.5% annually during 2006-2008. Therefore, these measures will give purchasers, including CMS, additional insight into the quality of care provided to Medicare beneficiaries.

"Developing meaningful benchmark standards are a key component to controlling the growth in healthcare costs, which is an important issue at the forefront of today's national agenda," said Jon Bumbaugh, Senior Director of Research, Development, and Analytics at Inovalon. "Inovalon is pleased to contribute to this agenda, via our close partnership with NCQA, by helping to evaluate these key performance measures within the Medicare population."

About Inovalon, Inc.

Inovalon, Inc. is a leading technology-enabled healthcare solutions provider focused on the importance of healthcare data and its ability to drive dramatic, objective improvement in clinical and quality outcomes, care management and financial performance throughout the healthcare community. Proprietary healthcare datasets, aggregation and analysis capabilities, combined with a national infrastructure of leading-edge technology, clinical prowess and deep human resources, empower Inovalon's advanced generation of healthcare assessment and improvement through highly informed solutions. Driven by data, Inovalon uniquely identifies gaps in care, quality, data integrity, and financial performance—while also bringing to bear the resources to resolve them. This differentiating combination provides a powerful capability suite, touching more than 540,000 physicians, 220,000 clinical facilities, and more than 120 million Americans, driving high‐value impact, improving the quality and economics for health plans, hospitals, physicians, patients, and researchers. Please visit www.inovalon.com for more information.

SOURCE Inovalon, Inc.