Health IT

Wow of the week: Startup builds interactive map to assess Meaningful Use effectiveness

The government’s incentives program offering funds to spur providers with Medicare and Medicaid patients to switch over to electronic medical records has led to 80 percent of providers agreeing to comply with government deadlines to prove Meaningful Use for EMRs by 2014. The goal of the program is to reduce medical errors and improve patient […]

By Stephanie Baum on March 09, 2013

The government’s incentives program offering funds to spur providers with Medicare and Medicaid patients to switch over to electronic medical records has led to 80 percent of providers agreeing to comply with government deadlines to prove Meaningful Use for EMRs by 2014. The goal of the program is to reduce medical errors and improve patient outcomes by increasing data transparency. A startup is tracking the program’s performance from the vantage point of the patients.

Launched this week at HIMSS, Social Health Insights’ data visualization project is using an interactive map to plot Medicare hospitals and providers attesting to Meaningful Use across the US. It will initially compare these hospitals’ patient satisfaction scores using the national standard, Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers Survey. But it will eventually include comparisons with non-attesting hospitals as well.

The open source project uses publicly available data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ website and also open data from Data.Medicare.gov. The code for the project is listed on GitHub.

Brian Norris, the CEO and co-founder of Social Health Insights, said the project was the brain child of Mark Silverberg, the chief technology officer and co-founder.

The plan is to update the interactive map whenever new data becomes available. Norris said the company wanted to “do something fun for everyone and demonstrate its abilities as an organization.”

Asked how he came up with the idea, Silverberg said in an e-mail: “The real impetus for this came late Saturday night when Sherry Reynolds (@Cascadia), [a startup mentor who works for the Office of National Coordinator with the Department of Health and Human Services,] tweeted about her geo-visualization with the data and I direct messaged her to see what else she was up to. This data is something I found interesting and wanted to make sure it was liberated from the CSVs [files that store tabular data]on CMS.gov. Sherry and I got to talking on Twitter and I decided to write up some code.”

“It began with some cleanup and geocoding of the CMS data but it quickly grew and by the end of the weekend I had a map view and was already contemplating how to bring in other data such as patient surveys.”

The company got its start last year when its idea for Mappy Health, a website that tracks disease trends using social media won an innovation challenge called, “Now Trending: #Health in My Community,” organized by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It has also developed a program that uses social media to track natural disaster trends.

“We see this as a way to build on top of what others have done in support of White House Chief Technology Officer Todd Park and the Open Data initiative,” added Norris.