With health IT week kicking off today, it’s a good time to check out some of the cool data mashups Brian Norris and Mark Silverberg have done through their company, Social Health Insights. They have built a business of collecting big data from government resources and social media to create useful visualizations that add insight into public health. More recently it has turned its attention to tracking Meaningful Use attestation. It also developed a Software-as-a-Service application to help hospitals monitor their quality measure compliance called, CheckQM.
In the latest version of its Meaningful Use visualizations, it has used data from the ONC (.csv file) to chart the progress each state has made on Meaningful Use since 2011. It compares how many records in each state have met Meaningful Use attestation — green indicates the number is on the low side compared with the rest of the country and blue shows it’s relatively high. Additionally, it shows which health IT vendors and products are helping states meet Meaningful Use requirements the most. They were produced with the help of visualization software from Tableau Public.
Norris wrote a post about how to focus on a slice of the data, namely 2011 year one attestations versus 2012 year two attestations in Illinois.
Pennsylvania, for example, falls on the high side of Meaningful Use attestation. Epic Systems, Allscripts and Community Computer Services are the dominant EMR vendors there. Epic’s EpicCare ambulatory electronic medical record product accounted for about one-quarter of records in the state meeting MU attestation: 16, 711 as of June 2013, according to Social Health Insights’ website.
Hovering over each state triggers a pop up window that shows the number of attestations. California is doing well, but Virgina is at the low end of the scale.
The map has these filters to sort the data:
- Attestation month
- EHR certification number
- EHR product name
- EHR product version
- Payment year
- Product classification
- Product setting
- Provider type
- Program year
- Specialty
- Vendor name
CheckQM helps to simplify the design and implementation of electronic clinical quality measures into providers’ electronic health record. The company sees it as a collaboration tool on decision documentation for projects related to clinical quality, such as ICD-10, Physician Quality Reporting System, Accountable Care Organizations, and the Medicare Shared Savings Program. according to Brian Norris.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
It sees its projects as works in progress and updates the visualizations when new data becomes available. This week it’s releasing an updated version of an open visualization Silverberg and Norris developed from scratch earlier this year — a mashup of quality and meaningful use data that includes Hospital Associated Infections and AHRQ quality measures. Some of the other projects it is developing using public sourced data include a visual representation of HIPAA breaches.
Social Health Insights got its start in 2012 as part of an innovation challenge by the department of Health and Human Services. The team of clinicians, developers, and designers use IT and data to positively impact health. It’s looking for partners to help it devise new ways to add value by bringing on more complicated data sets. It also is looking at helping users to create their own visualizations or analysis reports.
