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Comagine Health releases study demonstrating feasibility of quality and cost comparisons across states

May 10, 2019

Assessing health care performance using local claims data is part of a larger project to identify the effect of health systems on economic and clinical performance.

PORTLAND, Ore. — Comagine Health recently announced the release of a collaborative manuscript featured in The American Journal of Managed Care in May 2019. The manuscript, “Producing Comparable Cost and Quality Results from All-Payers Claims Databases,” was authored by the Network for Regional Healthcare Improvement (NRHI), Center for Improving Value in Health Care (CIVHC), Massachusetts Health Quality Partners (MHQP) and Comagine Health (formerly HealthInsight) in Oregon and Utah. The study demonstrates the feasibility of assessing health care performance within and across states using rich data sources and is part of a larger project to identify the effect of health systems on economic and clinical performance.

“We are grateful for the opportunity to work closely with our Regional Health Improvement Collaborative (RHIC) partners in developing and using the Uniform Data Structure (UDS) for this project. The UDS will continue to serve our organizations as we venture on to new projects leveraging our all-payers claims databases across regions,” stated Meredith Roberts, Oregon associate executive director for Comagine Health.

A key accomplishment was the development of a UDS file format that can be scaled across populations, measures and research dimensions to provide a consistent method to produce comparable findings across regions.

NRHI, CIVHC, MHQP and Comagine Health partnered with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and Harvard University in the Comparative Health System Performance Initiative Study funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). The work described in this paper is a subset of projects being facilitated through the NBER Center of Excellence.

“Comagine Health is dedicated to advancing the transparency of health care costs and quality in our communities. We recognize that All-Payers Claims Databases are critical for understanding trends in the cost of care and lowering costs while ensuring people receive high quality care,” Roberts added.

The full manuscript can be viewed in the May 2019 issue of The American Journal of Managed Care: https://www.ajmc.com/journals/issue/2019/2019-vol25-n5/producing-comparable-cost-and-quality-results-from-allpayer-claims-databases.

This project was supported by grant number U19HS024072 from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official view of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.