Collecting and analyzing quality of care and payment data is central to the shift from volume to value-based care. Reporting the results publicly is essential to the government’s mission to put the consumer at the center of this transformation. Lantana has provided key services at each stage of the data collection, analysis, and reporting process. We worked with the National Quality Forum (NQF) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to develop the first methods for reporting directly from electronic health records (EHRs) and today manage several of their key quality reporting initiatives, including the Hospital Compare website. We manage the implementation of CMS programs to reduce healthcare-associated infections (HAI) and unplanned readmissions to hospitals.

These projects include multi-year, multi-million-dollar prime contracts for the Hospital Quality Initiatives Public Reporting Support contract, reissued to Lantana in September 2018 after an initial five-year contract, and the Hospital Quality Reporting Program Support contract, which began in 2013. Key outcomes of these two projects include:

• The addition of a five-star rating system to the Hospital Compare website so that consumers have more information when deciding where to seek hospital care
• The addition of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense hospitals to the website
• The alignment and harmonization of quality measures that are used across several CMS programs to reduce reporting burden
• The collection and public posting of HAI data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
• A reduction of 1.4 percentage points in unplanned hospital readmissions between 2012 and 2016

Tools and methods used include:

• User-centered design studies and implementation principles
• Portfolio management to ensure successful updates to the website based on over 80 datasets submitted by various stakeholders
• Lean/agile methods to improve the process of website updates and refreshes
• Data quality assurance
• Plain language analysis to ensure the technically complex payment and quality of care data are presented to website stakeholders in a meaningful way
• The continued improvement to downloadable databases to provide non-consumer stakeholders, such as researchers, quality improvement professionals, and the press, with accurate and up-to-date data for analyses that can improve hospital quality and public health