As another HEDIS season comes to an end, most of us are carrying reminders that no matter how you approach the business of chart retrieval and abstraction, it seems to remain hard work with numerous dependencies for most health plans.
It’s typically at this time of year that I’m reminded of the guidance from W. Edwards Deming (one of the heads on my personal Mt. Rushmore of Quality Management) concerning supplier relationships. Deming’s philosophy of Total Quality Management and continuous improvement had been aggressively adopted by my then employer and having the good fortune of working at an organization with close ties to Harvard University, I had the privilege of attending a lecture given by Deming in 1990. Even at 90 years old he maintained an authoritative presence and spoke with a conviction and the passion of a recent convert.
The key message I took away from that hour with Deming was how much quality depended on the quality of relationships both those internal to a company, embodied in his message of “driving out fear” within an organization, as well as outward facing, embodied in his message about the value of investing in long term relationships with suppliers or vendor partners, as I like to think of our organization. Vendor partners that understand the needs today, have a vision for the future, can execute and have the competence and passion to work with their plan partners year-round.
I believe those two notions are exceedingly important in developing strategies to continuously improve the quality and completeness of hybrid reporting for HEDIS. A “one and done” approach to working with Medical Record Review or NCQA Certified HEDIS Software vendor partners will rarely address the issues related to reporting the most accurate HEDIS rates.
As a standard practice at HDVI, we advocate for and build year-round relationships with our plan partners and recognize that HEDIS hybrid rates are improved more from the work done by the plan-vendor partner teams between June and January (often called the off-season) than what is done between January and June will go a long way toward improving rates across the board for hybrid measures while often saving a lot of stress, aggravation and even money.
