Business Intelligence for Public Health Data
Vinaya: We have Bhami with us to tell us about this case study. Hello, Bhami. Tell us a bit about the client.
Bhami: In the US, health and human services review the quality of care provided to the patients by the managed care organizations and hospitals together.
We have prepared a dashboard, a public-facing dashboard to show the quality of care given within the state. One of the biggest states in the US, we have built a public-facing portal for them.
Vinaya: Preparing a public-facing portal for this must have been quite challenging. How big was the project?
Bhami: Every year they are processing 40 million claims to analyze and find the quality of care provided to the patients. And how they are paying for the quality. That kind of information we need to take out of those records. The challenge is collecting all the claims coming from various parts of the state. They are submitting on Medicaid. These claims, we analyzed, and we built around 60 standard measures, of quality of care provided. These measures are defined by NCQA and how it is compared with benchmark within the country and show the dashboard to the public.
The key challenge we faced in this project is data security. Because, of most of the measures we are facing to the public, we can’t disclose personally identifiable measures in the public portal. We specifically provided privacy for the data and identified the records that are more than CMS standards.
We applied all privacy standards related to NCQA and CMS and displayed the public portal. Also, the same portal is used for analyzing the data by health and human services as well as managed care organizations.
Security is important. One MCO cannot see the other MCO’s data. And then HHS can see data for everyone. We implemented the security in such a way that based on users’ data will be identified and shown to the people.
Overall, we have built around 300 dashboards out of 40 million records and showed some dashboards to the public and some dashboards to MCOs, and some dashboards to HSS. That’s how we have implemented this project.
Vinaya: 300 dashboards for 40 million records! That’s a big achievement. What were the key takeaways from this project?
Bhami: The key takeaways from the project is the type of data we are getting – multiple sources and then processing of data, particularly. Because PHI data is there. PHI means Personally Identifiable Health data. So, we cannot disclose the data outside the particular environment.
We built a FISMA environment, which is a standard for federal health agencies. Within that environment, we process the data. We brought all the permutations and combinations of the report out of the environment without any breach. We needed to check carefully and apply privacy to get the right data to the public. So, for that, we needed to spend some time on testing and then identify any loopholes and fix those things. For that, we had worked with the customer team to identify any privacy problems are there.
Vinaya: You have managed data privacy very well. What were the benefits of the project?
Bhami: The customer is able to provide reports on time to the public. Because our customer is a quality review organization. They wanted to provide the reports on MCO and public portals on time. So, we helped them to provide all kinds of standard reports on time. The reports are particularly interactive. They can access what they want.
We have provided help for every measure calculated and how it will be disseminated to the public, and how it is sent to the MCOs. That kind of information is very useful for them to collaborate within the team. It is a faster way to communicate with people.
Vinaya: What was the feedback from the client?
Bhami: By the completion of the project, the customer was very happy because seamlessly they started submitting reports to HSS. They commented that our service is very good. Particularly, the privacy and security we have implemented within the project are highly standard. That’s the comment they passed on to us about the project.
Vinaya: How did you feel about the success of the project?
Bhami: I feel proud that we have implemented a very good healthcare system for a particular state. This is a publicly facing portal. So many people are concurrently using the system.
Vinaya: Thank you, Bhami
Bhami: Thank you very much.
Vinaya: Thank you for watching.
