1upHealth Joins Early Adopter Program for NCQA Digital Content Services

BOSTON – Oct. 24, 2023 – 1upHealth, the market leader for claims and clinical data acquisition, exchange, and compute, today announced it is an early adopter of National Committee of Quality Assurance (NCQA) Digital Content Services.1upHealth and other pioneering healthcare organizations have joined the Early Adopter Program to demonstrate their commitment to advancing digitized quality measurement initiatives and to maximize flexibility and transparency in HEDIS^® performance measurement across individuals, organizations, and systems.

To accelerate the healthcare industry’s ongoing consumerization and digitization efforts, NCQA is transitioning to digital quality measurement with FHIR resources in a cloud-based container application – necessitating organizations to adopt cloud FHIR platforms to support quality initiatives like value-based care reporting, payer accreditation, and STAR ratings for Medicare Advantage plans. In preparation of these shifts,1upHealth helped develop an application to advance quality performance of payers and providers using FHIR R4 data, which will be used in the Early Adopter Program.

“Quality initiatives are integral to modern-day healthcare, and as NCQA brings quality into the digital age there will be a growing need among healthcare organizations, especially payers, for help transitioning to FHIR and the cloud,” said Don Rucker, MD,  1upHealth Chief Strategy Officer. “By becoming an Early Adopter of NCQA Digital Content Services, 1upHealth is helping to build foundational cloud services and data pipelines required to support NCQA measure protocols – granting plans early access to digital measures and, over time, enabling faster insights, next-gen technology, and improved outcomes. We are proud to be working with NCQA on this critical initiative and providing the data infrastructure expertise and platform to guide the industry through this long-overdue data revolution.”

1up’s participation in the Digital Content Services program is part of its longstanding commitment to working with NCQA and upholding its mission of advancing quality. In 2022, 1up was one of six organizations selected by NCQA to participate in its first Digital Quality Solutions pilot. As part of the pilot, 1up and other participants provided input on NCQA’s software offering, including its use for HEDIS measure reporting and its value-added contribution to advance quality improvement and care management efforts which helped to shape the current program.

The company will showcase its deep expertise on quality reporting, FHIR, and data integration at the NCQA Health Innovation Summit, taking place October 23-25 in Orlando, Florida. 1up Data Governance Manager Donna Lehr, RN will present, “Integrating Claim & Clinical Data for Quality Improvement,” on Tuesday, October 24 at 7:40 AM. To learn more about the session, visit the conference website here.1up will also exhibit at the conference, discussing its participation in the Early Adopter Program as well as how FHIR can optimize quality reporting at booth #109.

More Information on the Early Adopter Program for NCQA Digital Content Services

As part of the program, early adopters can access NCQA’s first software application for digitized HEDIS measures, hosted in the participant’s cloud environment. The system delivers computable, standards-based measure content, and incorporates an open-sourced clinical reasoning engine and tools for data requirement validation.

The Early Adopter Program includes 14 measures chosen specifically for their relevance in value-based care programming, with 20% also represented in the CMS’s Universal Foundations initiative. Other key benefits of the Early Adopter Program include a more streamlined, cost-contained process for HEDIS measure updates and certification. Early Adopter experiences and activities play a critical role in shaping NCQA’s framework and approach to building a commercial offering that will enable the practical and flexible use of digital quality measures across the full spectrum of value-based care use cases, including quality reporting.

HEDIS^® is a registered trademark of the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA).