Modernizing and Strengthening the Digital Health Ecosystem

Mathematica provided recommendations to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy/Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ASTP) for modernizing and strengthening the digital health ecosystem for Medicare beneficiaries.

 “We strongly support these efforts to examine and enhance the role that innovative technology can play in delivering high-quality care to Medicare beneficiaries and improving the administration of federal health insurance programs,” wrote Mathematica.

Mathematica submitted its recommendations in response to CMS’s request for information regarding the market of digital health products for Medicare beneficiaries and broader health technology infrastructure, including the state of data interoperability.

“We appreciate CMS’s commitment to identifying and advancing policy approaches that more effectively harness the potential of innovative health technologies,” said Jonathan Morse, senior vice president and managing director of the Federal Payors, Delivery Transformation, and Life Sciences Division at Mathematica. “By investing in a common analytic foundation, CMS can strengthen its efforts to leverage technology in practical and patient-centered ways and unlock a smarter, more responsive health system.”

Drawing on its technical expertise and commitment to helping the federal government tap the power of technology in practical and patient-centered ways, Mathematica made several recommendations, including the following:

• Make Medicaid populations and, by extension, Medicaid data a consistent focus in innovation contexts like value-based care arrangements by extending the use of Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System data into these settings to make Medicaid data accessible.
• Implement a persistent, universal Federal Medicaid Member Identifier, issued at the state level at the time of enrollment and coordinated through a centralized federal matching and issuing service to foster more cohesive, efficient care and oversight.
• Simplify clinical quality data responsibilities of providers by transitioning fully to digital quality measures over traditional quality measures that often depend on manual data collection and abstraction.
• Advance price transparency by implementing clearer data requirements and putting auditing mechanisms into place to ensure compliance with timelines, data format, completeness, and accuracy.
• Adopt a common data model for healthcare analytics to create efficiencies in how health data is normalized and reduce the burden on providers supporting data requests.
• Unsilo and encourage the reusability of health data sources by creating standards around data quality for highly used healthcare data sets and setting up systems to create a marketplace for and endorsement of both private and public healthcare data sets.