Digital Quality Summit 2022

Presented virtually – July 12-13, 2022

The videos below represent the “greatest hits”, the highest-rated presentations across two days of track session discussions.

July 12

Opening Plenary: Innovations that Matter to Veterans and Innovation Decision Makers

Featuring:
Peggy O’Kane, Founder and President, NCQA
Eric Schneider, Executive Vice President, Quality Measurement and Research Group, NCQA
Carolyn Clancy, Assistant Under Secretary for Health for Discovery, Education & Affiliate Networks, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

Event Highlight – Demystifying AI & ML: How Algorithms can Improve the Quality of Clinical Workflow

Featuring:
Deepti Pandita, Chief Health Information Officer, Hennepin Healthcare

“Shark Tank” Quality Spotlight: mHealth Applications Supporting High Quality Patient Care

Competition and camaraderie are on the agenda at Digital Quality Summit 2022, thanks to a new feature that’s sure to be a hit:

A “Shark Tank”-style contest of mHealth apps that support quality care.

App developers get 6 minutes to “pitch” their technology from the main Summit stage.

The Summit audience—“sharks”—vote to choose winners, including:

Best in Show: The overall audience favorite.
The Game Changer: How did we ever live without this this solution?

Health Informatics and Intersectionality: Health Equity

Clinical, Community and Advocacy Stakeholders Committed to Action: Tactics to raise awareness, strengthen leadership, to improve health outcomes for underserved populations while integrating cultural congruence and data strategies.

How do you prioritize strategies to advance health equity? Health care is experiencing a crisis where underserved populations are not being asked what they need and a lack of voice from the community regarding their needs and preferences. Many organizations are doing good work but it’s not penetrating the communities they want to serve. During this session we’ll examine how organizations are looking to connect to underserved communities and how to design solutions that provide whole-person care.

During this session, participants will:

Identify the factors that contribute to the idea of the “whole person”.
Assess new tools and techniques effectively engaging individuals, families, and communities.
Compare and contrast the issues surrounding specific clinical protocols like colorectal or breast cancer screening that engage the community.

An Innovative Digital Quality Ecosystem: Modeling NextGen dQMs

Evolving to a person-focused, clinical guideline-based digital quality measure using FHIR, CQL and BPM+

Everyone is talking about the Next Generation of digital quality measures, but what do these measures look like? What are person-centered digital quality measures and how are they better aligned with clinical guidelines than the current measure portfolio?

Using colorectal cancer screening as an example, during this session, participants will:

Learn how the evolving science of quality measurement is enabled by digital standards.
Get a visual tour of the proposed future of quality using a revised version of the COL-E measure.
Learn about the standards enabling the move to a fully digital quality ecosystem.

Digitally Enabled Care Innovation: Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze

Is the juice worth the squeeze? Why interoperability is long overdue and foundational to progress in healthcare quality

The interoperability rules and standards will change digital quality. During this session we will consider what it will take to align stakeholders around this objective and support the quadruple aim in healthcare.

As a result of this session, participants will be able to:

Recognize the standards and rules and how they support care and quality.
Articulate the pitfalls of data exchanges.
Project the impact of digital quality measures for the short-term and long-term health of organizations and the industry.
Understand the intersection between true interoperability, clinical workflow and optimization.

RWE, dQMs & the Virtuous Circle of the LHS: Aligning the Learning Health System

Aligning the Learning Health System & Continuous Quality Improvement Lifecycle

A representative expert panel will discuss the challenges facing the healthcare industry, individual ecosystem participants, and most importantly, patients. They will connect these challenges with those of the disparate activities of the Learning Health System (LHS) and lack of alignment with continuous Quality Improvement Lifecycle (QIL). The panel will discuss opportunities to better align related activities across and between the LHS and QIL for diseases, treatments, data, best practices, evidence, and patients of interest that are conceptually related. The panel will help establish the motivations, opportunities, value propositions, and desiderata for the standards, content, and implementation examples discussed in the sessions of Track 4.

2022 DQS Digital Solutions Showcase

Innovative solutions are front and center in this session focused on organizations making an impact on digital quality and advancing digital health.

Attendees will have the opportunity to vote for the organization that offered their favorite 5-minute presentation. Use the polling feature to cast your vote. Voting closes Wednesday at 11:30 AM ET. The winning organization will be announced as part of the closing session.

Leader: Eric Schneider, Executive Vice President, Quality Measurement and Research Group, NCQA

Health Informatics and Intersectionality: Technology Solutions

Enabling Health Equity through Technology and Enterprise Growth: Going beyond “screen and connect” strategies

How do we assess the effectiveness of the digital health solutions we are activating for patients? How do we balance the need to reach our patients with the push for privacy, standardization, and interoperability? We see emerging trends in technology, but the market is saturated. The technology needs to be fully embedded in the care team’s workflow. For specific populations this may mean engaging families and caregivers. During this session you will hear from organizations who are leveraging technology to meet the needs of underserved populations while prioritizing provider adoption.

During this session, participants will:

Expand their understanding of the strengths and limitations of technological solutions.
Examine the term “appropriate access” and what it looks like from multiple perspectives.
Review emerging technology and functionality, to encourage patient and provider empowerment.
Identify the technology that will improve digital literacy and reduce disparity.
Review examples of technology solutions.

Digitally Enabled Care Innovation: Digital solutions improving clinical practice

So much has changed in healthcare and clinical practice in the past 2 years. Providers needed to pivot and find solutions to keep treating their patients. This session will look at new workflows, innovations and technologies that have gotten us through a pandemic and will highlight what has staying power and what won’t be around for the long-term.

RWE, dQMs & the Virtuous Circle of the LHS: The Intersection of Digital Standards

The Intersection of Digital Standards:

How BPM+ can orchestrate CQL-FHIR artifacts to produce meaningful measures.

Conjoined session with T2

Standards Intersect: Complementary and Synergistic Standards-based Initiatives to Facilitate a Continuous QIL and the Virtuous LHS

Traditional quality measure specifications have been digitally expressed using FHIR and CQL. But NextGen measurement concepts require a more nuanced reasoning model to enable standard representation of complex clinical decision pathways that will align quality measure specifications with clinical decision support. An expert panel with extensive implementation experience will discuss a quality use case for reusing data, inferences, and computable knowledge for clinically related subjects (e.g., conditions, interventions, etc.). The debate will be focused on the strengths, challenges, and alignment of BPM+ and the FHIR® Clinical Reasoning Module. The session will discuss further opportunities to strengthen these standards through collaboration.

Day 1 Wrap Up and Day 2 Preview

Featuring:
Eric Schneider, Executive Vice President, Quality Measurement and Research Group, NCQA

July 13

Event Highlight – Panel Discussion – dQMs From Strategy to Implementation

Hosted by:
Eric Schneider, Executive Vice President, Quality Measurement and Research Group, NCQA
Viet Nguyen, Chief Standards Implementation Officer and Founder, Stratametrics

Health Informatics and Intersectionality: Public Policy

Influencing Public Policy: Building commitment toward advancing health equity by supporting healthy behaviors and care delivery that promotes equitable access to care.

As we aim to integrate health equity into care delivery models, what is the trajectory in creating public health policy? What do we need to do to ensure public policy has a place in the implementation of new technologies? How do we balance the needs of regulators, payors, and patients? Regulators play an important role in this conversation as they attempt to address reading and digital literacy gaps. Public policy is also a directive regarding budgets and resources. Payors, in many ways, drive the priorities because of how they reimburse providers. Patients want a choice regarding technology and data use, sometimes putting them at odds with regulators and payors. Public and private partnerships can be innovative and provide solutions to these concerns.

During this session, participants will:

Understand how social factors (race, gender, ethnicities, etc.) frame policies to achieve health equity.
Discover policies that shape standardization, interoperability, and data use.
Analyze how organizations can advocate for downstream interventions such as technology, implementation, budget, and community engagement.

An Innovative Digital Quality Ecosystem: Data Quality Assessment (DQA)

The focus of this discussion is enabling trust in information needed to power the next generation of quality measures.

Reproducibility, reliability and validity are all major considerations for anyone working in the digital quality ecosystem, but most quality measurement validation procedures are manual. These analytic processes must use standard data quality measures, ideally as digital artifacts aligned with the clinical quality measures that reference the data elements being assessed.

To enable efficient technology-augmented validation, end-user expectations for data fitness and its use in generating quality reports must be transparent and standardized.

Digitally Enabled Care Innovation: Digital Equity & Inclusion in Practice

Digital tools and innovations are exciting, but how can we incorporate them into our own areas of influence and make an informed decision about which tools or innovations to pursue? What barriers exist for underserved communities?

This session will focus on how digital tools and innovations are helping providers deliver high-quality care, particularly to those in underserved communities and those challenged by the digital divide.

Participants will:

Review the main challenges facing people in underserved communities and explore modalities available to bridge the digital divide.
Examine the benefits and drawback of each modality.
Construct their own understanding about how they might use these modalities to help underserved people in their own communities.

RWE, dQMs & the Virtuous Circle of the LHS – Case Example from a Content Producer

Interoperable, Reusable Content – Case Example from a Content Producer: Cervical Cancer Screening and Management Computable Guidelines

Demonstrating interoperable, reusable content from the perspective of a content producer, the panel will present a CDC-sponsored project to develop cervical cancer screening and management computable guidelines based on CPG-on-FHIR®. Specifically, the panel will describe how multiple clinical guidelines in cervical cancer screening and management from the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) and American Society for Colposcopy and Cervical Pathology (ASCCP) were developed into a faithful computable representation (i.e., computable guideline). The panel will then show how the computable guideline content was reused for clinical decision support (CDS) and electronic clinical quality measures (eCQMs). Challenges for CDS and eCQM implementation related to unstructured data from external systems (e.g., pathology information systems) and opportunities for future improvements will also be addressed.

How CDC is Using Technology to Enhance its Diabetes Prevention and Management Efforts

Diabetes presents a significant public health challenge. According to CDC’s National Diabetes Statistics Report, more than 37 million Americans have diabetes and another 96 million adults have prediabetes, putting them at high risk of progressing to type 2 diabetes and developing other serious health conditions. CDC is implementing several new innovative strategies to prevent and manage diabetes. These include efforts to modernize data collection through surveillance systems, increase use of cloud technologies, and improve public health data-sharing. CDC will discuss these strategies and highlight its work to reduce complications, disabilities, and burden associated with diabetes.

Featuring: Christopher Holliday, Director, Division of Diabetes Translation, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Health Informatics and Intersectionality: Data and Analytics

Telling a Story with Data to Improve Health Equity: Using data to work effectively toward health equity.

How do we use data to inform, monitor, and evaluate digital and social solutions and interventions? What type of frameworks should exist when sharing data to effectively design models that reinforce or promote communication, care planning, and health plan delivery? Data informs the strategy and enables monitoring of the effectiveness of the models for interventions. The data also helps to evaluate the organization’s implementation process and evaluate the impact of the strategies over time. It’s important to understand how geographic considerations impact population and community needs. This session will examine insights and tactics on how data can be leveraged to advance the engagements and model design.

During this session, participants will:

Discover how organizations are collaborating to promote evidence collection and health for underserved and high-risk populations.
Review recommended frameworks on how to build effective data structures that promote care for understand and high-risk populations.
Understand the intersection between clinical and community data to help organizations build capacity for health equity.

An Innovative Digital Quality Ecosystem: OMOP on FHIR

OMOP on FHIR: Harmonizing models to address the synergistic needs of the quality and research communities.

Digitally Enabled Care Innovation: Using Digital Tools to Support Patient Care

Using Digital Tools to Support Patient Care and Create Value: The Policies We Need to Promote Continued Innovation

Digitally enabled clinical services and tools for patients and health care teams replaced in-person encounters and helped during Covid 19-related staffing shortages. Access to care was redefined. This session will highlight key insights from innovative approaches to care and lessons learned during the pandemic. We will discuss the implications for the future of health care and how health care policy must evolve to support innovation.

As a result of this session, participants will be able to:

Recognize the role that digital tools play in providing quality care.
Consider innovative approaches to care and their potential for the future
Understand current health policy issues related to these innovations

RWE, dQMs and the Virtuous Circle of the LHS: – Case Example from a Provider

Interoperable, Reusable Content – Case Example from a Provider: Reusability in the Implementation of Multiple Related Use Cases

Demonstrating interoperable, reusable content from the perspective of a provider, the panel will present the use of CPG-on-FHIR® and other approaches to drive continuous quality improvement in patient care that also provide value in alternative payment models. Specifically, the panel will describe their implementation of multiple related use cases for the same guideline, highlighting reusability across the use cases.

Digital Quality Summit: Wrap Up

Featuring:
Eric Schneider, Executive Vice President, Quality Measurement and Research Group, NCQA