LEAWOOD, KS – A newly formed clinical data repository project between the American Academy of Family Physicians and Nashville-based Emdeon promises to be much more than just “a data dump,” its key designer says.

 

Steven Waldren, MD, director of Leawood, Kan.-based AAFP, contends that once the recently launched CDR project concludes next year, “it will generate reports and provide benchmark data that will help members compare their practice data against that of their peers.” The one-year pilot project will include up to a dozen family medicine practices with varied characteristics. Provider clearinghouse Emdeon will bring its data management and distribution resources to the partnership, while AAFP will bring clinical, healthcare operations and health informatics expertise. Active data collection is scheduled for the following six months and formal analysis of the pilot is set for the final three months of the cycle.

 

AAFP has been working toward this initiative for the past five years. Waldren says that in 2006, the physician association realized it had the ability to aggregate data, benchmark and provide analytics for practices and that “it was what we needed to do.” Once meaningful use entered the healthcare IT field, Waldren says he saw it as a way “to get to the point where it would become real…the pilots around the medical home, Medicaid centers for intervention and accountable care organizations…the business model was starting to change and that a repository with a rich set of analytics was becoming available to members. We decided it made the most sense to conduct a pilot program.”

 

Gene Boerger, Emdeon vice president of provider product development, says that despite having “some pretty good analytic engines,” the challenge for the company was to acquire the right information. “AAFP was already doing business with us, so that was our ‘aha moment.’ We had the connectivity to their physicians, the network and had the skills to build the information through our distribution platform, Emdeon Vision. With AAFP’s clinical expertise, we are able to forge a process where they provide the knowledge and we can distribute it.”

 

The AAFP-Emdeon partnership came about by recommendation of AAFP senior adviser David Kibbe, MD, who saw great potential from the collaboration.

 

“One of the reasons that we chose to work with Emdeon is their access to multi-payer data that would allow AAFP member physicians and their practices to get a fuller picture of a population being cared for than would data from a single health plan,” Kibbe said. “Another important factor was our trust that Emdeon would help the AAFP to be good data stewards, using this important information for the purposes of quality and safety improvement. Finally, we believe that Emdeon has shown its ability to work in a collaborative way with many other companies, an important issue that will ultimately help our members to add clinical data from their EHRs to the claims and administrative data.”