CMS Selects Lantana Consulting Group to Evaluate and Recommend Tools and Processes for Measuring National Healthcare Quality

Lantana Group received $7M CMS contract for electronic specification of clinical quality measures & support

January 20, 2012 – Lantana Consulting Group received a $7 million government award to improve the measurement of the quality of clinical care in America. The new task order, designated “eQuality,” from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), is to evaluate, recommend and develop tools and processes for expressing quality of care measures so that they can be reported to CMS directly from electronic health record (EHR) systems replacing manual systems and use of insurance claims data.

In addition to Lantana Group, other team members are the National Center for Quality Assurance and Telligen. The eQuality team will also convene two technical expert panels for broad input into project work.

“Over 100 years ago, Lord Kelvin said that if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it. We believe that if you cannot standardize it, you cannot measure it,” said Dr. Bob Dolin, Lantana president, chief medical officer and eQuality principal investigator. “This project will have a direct impact in our national efforts to improve quality measurement, reporting and analysis.”

Electronic specification (e-specification) of quality measures is the expression of healthcare data, definitions, and logic in a form that is usable directly by EHR systems. E-specifications are key enablers in the transition from quality data management that requires extensive, paper-based, labor-intensive, redundant processes to a process that reuses data resident in EHR systems.

“Quality reporting in healthcare follows many disparate work flows and patterns,” said Liora Alschuler, Lantana Group’s CEO. “Through this task order we will examine clinical work flow for electronically specified quality measures and recommend end-to-end quality reporting processes for CMS on a national scale.”

The Lantana staff led by Dolin and Alschuler is actively involved in developing standards-based electronic quality measures (eMeasures) and are co-editors of the HL7 Health Quality Measure Format and Clinical Document Architecture standards, which are the foundation for this work.

The task order supports Office of Clinical Standards and Quality activities within the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act program, which is a part of the larger American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). The HITECH Act provides for incentive payments to hospitals and physicians to adopt EHR systems and use them to improve quality of care and patient health. Including option years, the total amount of the award is $7 million.

Lantana Consulting Group provides services and software for standards-based health information exchange. Lantana Group’s client list includes Fortune 100 companies and organizations in the public and private sectors, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Cancer Institute and the National Quality Forum.  www.lantanagroup.com

Contact:

Joy Kuhl, On behalf of Lantana Group, (818) 308-7063, joy@optimalaccords.com