Inovalon Launches Converged Stars Health Equity Analytics To Address CMS Regulations and Empower Health Equity Index Success
August 06 2024 - 8:00AM
Inovalon, a leading provider of cloud-based software solutions
empowering data-driven healthcare, today launched Converged Stars
Health Equity Analytics to help Medicare Advantage (MA) plans
address healthcare disparities and improve performance in alignment
with the new Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)
Health Equity Index (HEI) framework. The SaaS solution enables MA
health plans to predict CMS HEI scores and rewards, identify and
address gaps in health equity programs, and benchmark performance
against other plans. CMS is using performance data from 2024 and
2025 to calculate the HEI score and reward, making it essential for
MA plans to gain insights into HEI performance now while they still
have the opportunity to identify, understand, and address
disparities.
The pandemic underscored systemic health
disparities, prompting CMS to introduce the HEI as the new reward
factor to incentivize MA and Part D plans to improve care quality
for socially at-risk beneficiaries. CMS ranks contract quality
measure performance for populations with social risk factors to
determine additional rewards against the plan’s star ratings
performance. While most plans have launched health equity
initiatives, many lack the necessary data infrastructure to drive
and sustain meaningful impacts for members and their bottom
line.
Inovalon’s Converged Stars Health Equity
Analytics provides actionable insights based on CMS’ 14 individual
quality measures, stratified by social risk factors such as dual
eligibility for Medicaid, low-income subsidy, disabled status, and
more. The solution tracks performance and enrollment at the
patient, contract, and plan levels to focus on areas with
significant disparity gaps and tailor solutions to address member
characteristics and needs. Inovalon's data visualizations and
analytics empower MA plans to target efforts effectively,
continually analyze progress, and improve member outcomes and star
ratings for bonus payments.
“As many health inequities are systemic,
addressing disparities at the population health level requires
detailed analyses,” said Mike Jones, President and General Manager
of Inovalon’s Payer Business Unit. “Converged Stars Health Equity
Analytics meets this need by empowering health plans with essential
insights into their performance metrics for their populations with
social needs and the factors impacting their CMS Health Equity
Index reward. Our customers benefit from seamless access to not
only meaningful analyses of their own membership situation, but
also reliable benchmarking data and insights that support broader
quality and risk initiatives, which are crucial to advancing health
equity.”
Converged Stars Health Equity Analytics, part of
Inovalon’s Converged Solution Suite, is the only SaaS solution that
offers real-time analyses of a MA plan as well as comparative
analyses of its performance against other contracts to determine
CMS HEI scores and reward factors. The suite allows current and
prospective health plan customers immediate cloud access to meet
HEI reporting requirements and pathways to improvement when
needed.
These insights are powered by Inovalon’s
analytics engine that leverages data from its MORE2 Registry®, the
largest healthcare primary source and de-identified dataset on over
391 million unique lives and quality metrics from more than 80% of
U.S. health plans’ members. The Registry covers more than 50% of
Medicare beneficiaries and delivers benchmark data for Converged
solutions to optimize quality measurement, star ratings, risk
adjustment, and more.
To learn more about how Converged Stars Health
Equity Analytics can forecast performance and help your plan meet
the CMS HEI requirements, please visit:
https://www.inovalon.com/products/payer-cloud/stars-health-equity-analytics/.
About Inovalon
Inovalon is a leading provider of cloud-based
software solutions empowering data-driven healthcare. The Inovalon
ONE® Platform brings together national-scale connectivity,
real-time primary source data access, and advanced analytics into a
sophisticated cloud-based platform empowering improved outcomes and
economics across the healthcare ecosystem. The company’s analytics
and capabilities are used by nearly 20,000 customers supporting
over 53,000 sites of care, and are informed by the primary source
data of more than 84 billion medical events across 1.1 million
physicians, 670,000 clinical settings, and 391 million unique
lives. For more information, visit www.inovalon.com.
Contact:Tom PaolellaSr.
Director, Press and Analyst Relations,
InovalonThomas.Paolella@inovalon.com