Health IT

Why Mercy ACO collaborated with Innovaccer to improve how it handled data

Mercy ACO lacked a solid way to connect its data from disparate sources, so it worked with Innovaccer and its data platform to help solve the issue.

data, technology

Since its founding in 2012, Des Moines, Iowa-based Mercy ACO has grown from a five-organization entity with two value-based contracts to a 198-organization group with roughly 17 value-based contracts.

But the accountable care organization had a problem.

“We had a pain point across our network,” Derek Novak, COO of Mercy ACO noted in a recent phone interview. The entity had disparate electronic health records and billing systems and lacked “a good way and a quick way to get them connected.”

The ACO identified a few specific issues: how the data was being handled, the speed at which data was transmitted and ensuring transparency, particularly among providers. Clinicians needed to see information that was actionable and useful to them.

The organization then began interviewing vendors to find a company that could solve this dilemma. Eventually, it decided to take another route. “We said, ‘We’re going to go rogue and go down a different path and find someone that’s willing to partner with us,” Novak said.

Around 2015, Mercy ACO came across Innovaccer, a healthcare data platform company headquartered in San Francisco, California. The startup, which recently secured a $25 million Series B round, has a tool that enables healthcare organizations to bring data from various sources together.

Novak explained that Innovaccer was able to pull data and information out from the ACO’s various sources and aggregate it.

“They were able to do in 90 days what it would take nine months [to do] with any other vendor,” he said.

By September 2016, Mercy ACO started transitioning to the San Francisco startup’s overall analytics platform as well. Additionally, Novak said his organization has worked with Innovaccer to develop a care management documentation platform.

Looking ahead, the ACO hopes to work with Innovaccer to engrain more data and analytics into its current processes.

Throughout the entire endeavor, Novak said his organization learned a few lessons. One of the most significant has to do with structuring the process. At the beginning of the undertaking, Mercy ACO started to attack and extract all its clinical data first. But, Novak said, it quickly realized much of that data was non-standardized, which made the process all the more challenging.

“We were running on a treadmill and not really getting anywhere,” he noted.

Thus, it altered its course and examined the standardized data it already possessed. “Focus on that data that you know is getting clean and start work in that area,” Novak advised.

Photo: Pixtum, Getty Images

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