Vantage Point Milestones

2010:  SmartCare to Incorporate National Quality Standards 

Among several new features in the 2010 release of SmartCare will be a range of national quality standards to augment the wellness and preventive-related quality reports already in the system.  Since there are a number of competing standards offered by the AHRQ, NCQA, and others, Vantage Point is designing a database-driven approach so that the standards will be easily updated in reference tables rather than a “hard coded” reporting approach.  Many of these quality standards have been able to be measured in SmartCare since its inception through its dynamic query functionality, but this new module will make it easier to generate such reports. 

2009:  SmartCare Chosen for Key Role in Hospital Clinical Integration

SMA Informatics Partners, LLC of Richmond, VA has chosen SmartCare as the data warehouse and analysis system for the Long Island Health Network (LIHN), a 10-hospital consortium that is a national leader in clinical integration efforts.  LIHN worked with the team to develop a number of customized functions in SmartCare tailored to its sharing of clinical data among the hospitals in the group.  The system went live on July 1 and users at all 10 hospitals are utilizing the system over a VPN Internet network.

2008:  SmartCare Chosen by 2 New York Medicaid Plans for New Disease-Group Payment System

The New York State Medicaid program recently established a new payment system, based on their adoption of 3M’s Clinical Risk Groups (CRG) software to determine the disease classification of each patient and then use that score to set payment rates.  NYS Medicaid has encouraged the State’s Medicaid health plans to utilize the CRG software themselves in order to analyze their data, and further stipulated that all payment questions must be based on the CRG classifications.  As a result, 2 NYS Medicaid Plans, Fidelis Care New York, and the Affinity Health Plan, have purchased SmartCare, one of the few systems which has integrated the 3M CRG software in order to provide the highest quality predictive modeling capabilities.

2007:  Additional Drilldown Functionality Brings Up Claim and Transaction Detail in Seconds

Among several new features in the 2007 release of SmartCare, more drilldown functionality has been added to make it even easier to see the encounter records and all of the individual transactions that comprise each episode of care.  Now throughout every module and submodule for resource utilization analysis, the user can simply double-click on any row of the results set and instantly all of the encounters behind that result are displayed.  Then, by double-clicking on any of the encounter records in that drilldown window, another drilldown window appears displaying all of the transaction detail records for the selected encounter.  This enables much quicker review of any cases that the analyst may be reviewing.

2005:  Vantage Point’s Data Warehouse Ready for Electronic Medical Records Now

Virtually all healthcare data warehouses store either claims data or medical record data, but not both. These are repositories either for financial history or biomedical research. But from the beginning, SmartCare’s data warehouse was designed to support both kinds of data.  SmartCare’s data warehouse was designed around the patient, not around a particular type of data, with the anticipation that the data about the patient would grow. With EMR data, more of the available data structure is being used.

While being able to store medical record and claims data together has suddenly become essential, there’s also the need to have analysis tools able to look at both. Here again SmartCare is already ready. Its analytical modules fit hand-in-glove with its data warehouse, so it really doesn’t matter whether the user wants to drilldown into the patient’s cholesterol test results, or emergency room costs. Five years ago Vantage Point was given a medical record dataset from a cardiology practice that consisted of claims, lab test results, and drug prescriptions to make sure that you could analyze all of it together, and look at any area from any other area. In other words, you can get answers to financial questions based on clinical results, and visa-versa. But in addition, you can have both types of data in the same report, and on the screen together.

2004:  SmartCare Being Used in all 4 Major Healthcare Sectors

With the recent purchases of its SmartCare®  healthcare data warehouse/mining software by a major regional insurer and by a state government, Vantage Point has now sold the system into all of the major sectors of the American healthcare delivery system. This is a breakthrough in the effort to establish a common data repository that can be shared by all healthcare organizations.

The delivery of healthcare in America is commonly divided into 4 primary sectors, payers (insurance companies and HMOs), hospitals, physicians, and government. The two new Vantage Point clients are the Health Insurance Plan (HIP) of New York, and the State of Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH). HIP, with over one million members, will be using SmartCare® ® to monitor contracts with over 800 provider organizations and employers. IDPH will start by loading 25 million claims from hospitals across the state. Two very different organizations with very different missions, using the same system, right out of the box, no customization required.

What is even more exceptional is that the identical system is also being used by one of the nation’s largest regional hospital/physician networks, Sharp Healthcare of San Diego, California, and one of the nation’s largest physician associations, the 2,300-member Hudson IPA of Tarrytown, New York. The simple fact that four such different organizations solved their data warehousing, mining and reporting needs with the same system shows that having a common platform for storing and analyzing healthcare data is not only possible, but a reality.

2002:  New Features in SmartCare Add to its Power 

• Membership Module. This module imports HMO membership files (or would receive from any other payer) into special tables which have been added to the database. In the Membership Module is a set of a dozen standard reports concerning PCP panels, plan eligibility, and other subjects.
• Standard Reports: The new Utilization Reports Module has over 20 reports regarding a range of wellness, preventive care, ER utilization, and other basic issues.
• Expanded functionality in the Query Module. You may now create and save queries which let you group all claims by an individual member, define grouping queries sequencing up to 4 fields, and combine multi-level grouping and sorting.
• A new Detail-level Only Query Module. Previously you could see the detail-level (individual charge lines) only one patient at a time as a drill-down from an episode-level query. There is now a complete module, similar to the current Query Module that goes against the entire detail-level claims data, and allows you to create reports showing, for example, all providers and their patients with a certain CPT code or range of codes, and create summaries.
• Cross-study Patient/Provider Tracking Module. To strengthen SmartCare®’s disease management capabilities, you are now be able to track patient care, by patient, PCP, or provider, across any two studies, thus enabling you to do longitudinal analysis.
• Percentage columns added to all of the Resource Utilization screens to see the percentage of the total that each individual row comprises. There is a separate percentage column for the total number of episodes or services, and a percentage column for the total financial amount.
• Porting of the software to the Oracle database, version 8 or higher.