Health Data Essentials Receives NCQA Software Certification for HEDIS® Quality Measures

EssentialStars™ Certified for the Support of Star Quality Improvement Programs

BALTIMORE, Feb. 27, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Health Data Essentials' (HDE) flagship product, EssentialStars, has received certification from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) for the seventeen HEDIS® Quality Measures in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Star Quality Program.

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Richard Lieberman, CEO of HDE said, "NCQA certification provides the assurance that EssentialStars' Star Ratings calculations are accurate. It is imperative that EssentialStars health plan clients and their constituents can rely on the validity of the quality measures in order to gain real-time insight for targeting their member and provider-specific interventions."

To achieve certification, NCQA supplied test data for each measure that were then processed using EssentialStars. The test results generated were compared against the expected results to ensure that they match exactly to the NCQA specifications. In addition to the seventeen Star Rating measures, other HEDIS measures have already achieved certification as well.

EssentialStars is a web-accessible business intelligence system designed to provide actionable data for creation and prioritization of interventions that close quality care gaps. It allows users to navigate from plan-level ratings to Star Ratings at the provider group, PCP, predominant provider, and member level depending on business needs. It identifies gaps in care for each member including preventive screenings and providers needing intervention, and captures cross-functional data to create a comprehensive member profile. Multiple time spans are reported for each measure. These time spans allow for assessment of year-over-year changes at the measure level and provider level.

About Health Data Essentials

Health Data Essentials (HDE) provides intuitive software tools and consulting services to health care plans contracting with Medicare and Medicaid programs. Its mission is to assist risk-adjusted managed care plans with improved health care delivery through superior revenue management and quality improvement initiatives. In addition to EssentialStars, HDE offers analytical services for Medicare Advantage and risk-adjusted Medicaid plans. These include disease targeting for retrospective data collection and prospective assessments, quality improvement plan targeting, medical record data collection and coding for MA and Medicaid health plans, clinical documentation improvement, EssentialCoder software and the EssentialHCC Coding eBook for Medicare risk-adjustment.  For more information, please visit: www.hdecompany.com.

SOURCE Health Data Essentials