ClosedLoop, a healthcare data science platform, has launched two new offerings to help measure and guide the real-world impact of healthcare programs.
The tools are designed to help healthcare organizations analyze, evaluate, monitor and refine their programs to mitigate adverse events, improve outcomes and reduce unnecessary costs.
ClosedLoop, founded in 2017, develops artificial-intelligence-based solutions that forecast a wide range of outcomes and avoidable adverse events. In 2021, the company won the $1.6 million Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) AI Health Outcomes Challenge to predict health problems with AI.
The two new solutions, one of which is free, were designed to work together to help improve outcomes.
“To succeed in value based care, organizations need to do two things,” Andrew Eye, co-founder and CEO of ClosedLoop, said in an announcement. “They need to be able to predict the future, and they need to be able to change it.” The two new products tackle each of those areas.
Predicting the future with ACO-Predict
ACO-Predict, free for all Medicare ACOs, leverages AI to stratify population health risk. When combined with CMS’ recently updated beneficiary claims data feeds, ACO-Predict provides turnkey risk stratification for complex care management (CCM) programs. Its algorithms have an increased accuracy of 41% as compared to legacy risk scores, ClosedLoop says.
CCM programs are a tool ACOs use to reduce costs and improve outcomes in Medicare populations. Increased accuracy in predicting avoidable adverse events can drastically improve the overall impact and return on interest for such programs, the company said.
ACO-Predict can be live in just a few hours and requires no IT integration as data flow directly from CMS via the API. The solution includes paid tiers that support non-Medicare populations, additional data feeds and other program targeting like transitions of care and specialist referrals.
Changing the future with Evaluate
Evaluate is a software-as-a-service product for assessing and monitoring the impact of complex population health programs over time. The impact and return on investment for population health programs can be difficult and expensive to quantify.
Providers and payers evaluating population health programs typically rely on pre-post studies, which look at outcomes before a program’s implementation and after. But these pre-post studies are limited in scope, ClosedLoop argues; while they look at outcomes among patients who were enrolled in a program, it can be difficult to drill down on patients with shared characteristics who were eligible for the program but did not enroll. There may be thousands of characteristics that need to align, ranging from age to gender to the social determinants of health and more.
Evaluate can target all the needed variables and compare outcomes between these cohorts, the company said.
Pre-post analyses were also interrupted by COVID, rendering comparisons of outcomes virtually irrelevant, Jennifer Zbell, vice president of clinical affairs at payer Healthfirst, said during a virtual media roundtable hosted by Closed Loop.
Evaluate can check outcomes continuously as programs and populations evolve over time, ultimately helping drive more frequent improvements and more targeted interventions, ClosedLoop said.
To date, Evaluate has been piloted by payers and providers managing more than 2.7 million members across the country.