Michigan Health & Hospital Association Partners with ArborMetrix to Help Hospitals Succeed With Value-based Payment

ANN ARBOR, Mich., July 16, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- ArborMetrix, Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based healthcare analytics solutions, and the Michigan Health & Hospital Association (MHA) Keystone Center today announced a strategic partnership to use the ArborMetrix platform to identify care improvement and cost-reduction opportunities in hospitals across the state.

The MHA will combine its all-payer claims database with the EpisodeMetrix™ platform from ArborMetrix to provide its member hospitals with insights into their performance on readmissions measures and other clinical measures of acute care quality. The EpisodeMetrix platform will provide clinically credible and statistically reliable analytics and reporting based on state-wide hospital discharge data that will help MHA Keystone Center members reduce readmission rates and improve the quality of care for the most common and costly surgeries and medical treatments.

"The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) now considers readmissions analysis for key conditions as a critical component in its value-based payment programs," said Sam R. Watson, MSA, CPPS, MT (ASCP), senior vice president, Patient Safety & Quality, MHA, and executive director, MHA Keystone Center. "We plan to work with ArborMetrix to analyze readmissions rates for key conditions including pneumonia, heart failure, acute myocardial infarction and joint replacement, and identify patients treated at multiple facilities to more accurately calculate readmission rates and generate savings for many high-cost conditions. This will allow our member hospitals to not only comply with the CMS requirements for value-based payments, but more importantly to understand what they will need to do to improve the quality of care for their patients."

In addition to readmissions analysis, the MHA Keystone Center also announced that it will use the EpisodeMetrix™ solution to analyze quality metrics for high-value conditions and procedures that have significant volume, cost and variability in quality. The episodic measures will include in-hospital mortality, rates of serious surgical complications, rates of unplanned reoperations, readmission rates and as well hospital composite quality scores for each procedure and condition.

This is the latest partnership between the MHA Keystone Center and ArborMetrix. Earlier in 2014, the MHA Keystone Center and ArborMetrix partnered to use the RegistryMetrix™ platform at approximately 60 hospitals across the state to capture obstetrics data and performance reports to help reduce obstetrical adverse events and improve patient safety. RegistryMetrix enables the MHA Keystone Center to define clinical measures for a specialty's most important conditions and rapidly deploy comparative performance reports through a cloud-based platform.

"The MHA continues to raise the bar among state healthcare associations through investments in performance measurement analytics to improve the safety and quality of care for patients," said Brett Furst, CEO of ArborMetrix. "MHA members will find immediate value in this initiative as changing reimbursement models continue to put pressure on their bottom lines."

TWEET THIS: The @mihospitalassoc partners with @ArborMetrix for #ClinicalPerformanceAnalytics to improve quality of care. | http://bit.ly/1r2GVLg

About Michigan Health & Hospital Association
Based in greater Lansing, the MHA advocates in Michigan and Washington, DC, on behalf of healthcare providers and the communities and patients they serve. The MHA is a nationally recognized leader on initiatives that protect and promote quality, cost-effective and accessible healthcare. To learn more, visit http://www.mha.org. The MHA Keystone Center is a nonprofit organization that brings patient safety experts and hospitals together to work in collaborative programs to improve patient safety and healthcare quality and to reduce medical errors. To date, the center has been funded by MHA-member hospitals, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Michigan Department of Community Health. For more information, visit http://www.mhakeystonecenter.org.

About ArborMetrix
ArborMetrix, Inc., located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, provides a unique, cloud-based platform for performance measurement and clinical intelligence in acute and specialty care. Based on its industry changing econometric research, ArborMetrix solutions deliver rigorous data analysis   while incorporating advanced risk and reliability adjustments. With actionable insights grounded in clinical evidence, ArborMetrix clients quickly achieve quality improvements and cost savings. For more information, visit www.arbormetrix.com, email [email protected] or call 734-661-7949.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140217/MM66640LOGO

SOURCE ArborMetrix