Greetings. Jeff Brandes here.
After a bit of a writing hiatus, I want to bring everyone up to speed on the activities that have been taking place at Azara. Since my last communication, we have gone through two product releases cycles, and I am happy to say that the culmination of many months of work by the Azara team has delivered some very important functionality for the long-term future of DRVS.
You have probably noticed in some of the recent release notes comments about ‘upgrading the components of measure aggregation and framework.’ Our April release capitalized on these changes and with that you may have already noticed many changes in the application aimed at supporting your meaningful use and PCMH efforts.
We are excited to make these available and look forward to capitalizing further upon the opportunities it offers our development teams to put forth new and exciting functionality in future releases.
Should you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us as support@azarahealthcare.com
Here’s a rundown of what’s new in 3.10 (April) & 3.11 (June):
Meaningful use clinical quality measures (CQMs) – 2014
We have developed MU CQM Scorecard Reports for 25 of the 64 2014 Edition Clinical Quality Measures. The full list of measures can be found here.
In addition, in June we added NQF0418, Depression Screening and Follow Up to our stable of measures. While this measure was written to the 2014 Meaningful Use Specification, it has not yet gone through the certification process.
We continue to maintain the 2011 Edition Clinical Quality Measures (CQMs) that we have developed over the years, but plan to phase them out as clients complete their transitions to new specifications.
HEDIS Measures
Fifteen (15) HEDIS measures have been developed and made available on both Scorecard Reports and in the Measure Analyzer. The measures include:
- Childhood Immunization Status (CIS)
- Immunizations for Adolescents (IMA)
- Human Papillomavirus Vaccine for Female Adolescents (HPV)
- Colorectal Cancer Screening (COL)
- Breast Cancer Screening (BCS)
- Cervical Cancer Screening (CCS)
- Chlamydia Screening in Women (CHL)
- Controlling High Blood Pressure (CBP)
- Cholesterol Management for Patients with Cardiovascular Conditions (CMC)
Comprehensive Diabetes Care (CDC) suite including:
- Blood Pressure
- Eye Exam
- Foot Exam
- A1c (< 7, < 8, < 9, > 9, Tested)
- LDL (< 100, < 130, Tested)
- Nephropathy Screening
- Tobacco Status and Cessation
- Use of Appropriate Medications for People with Asthma (ASM)
- Adults' Access to Preventive / Ambulatory Health Services (AAP)
- Children and Adolescents' Access to Primary Care Practitioners (CAP)
- Prenatal and Postpartum Care (PPC)
- Well Child Visits (W15)
Note that some of these new measures may require additional/new mappings between DRVS and your EHR. If you believe this to be the case (e.g., your results are negligible), please reach out to Azara support to schedule time to complete these updates.
Payer Group Filter
The ability to filter results by Payer Group, meaning that only patients with an active payer identified within the Payer Group are included in the denominator. Activation of this feature requires work with each individual center to identify and create 'groups' of individual payers. Azara will be reaching out in the coming weeks on this effort.
OB Registry
In our April release, we introduced an OB Registry to a few select clients. We have spent the past few months testing, gathering feedback and tweaking the report; we are just about ready to enable this for other clients. While we plan to turn it on for everyone later this summer, additional mappings will be required for all of the fields to populate.
Massachusetts Primary Care Payment Reform Initiative (PCPRI)
To better equip our nearly 25 Massachusetts community health centers for payment reform, Azara has rolled out a set of scorecards and measures to support MassHealth’s groundbreaking Medicaid payment initiative. The majority of the PCPRI measures are meaningful use measures, however, we have already added three measures that are not part of meaningful use, and we plan to complete the remaining three measures for the program by then end of August. The availability of these measures allowed the 15 participating DRVS sites to participate in the program without purchasing new systems or needing to commission new custom reports.
Additionally, there are several exciting new features and functions we have introduced to select clients during the past few months. We will be gathering feedback, doing additional testing and polishing these features before announcing their general availability. I am very excited about these enhancements, and can’t wait to unveil them publicly. Please stay tuned for additional announcements as we close out the summer and head into the fall.
Jeff Brandes is CEO of Azara Healthcare.