IMO Precision Sets: The key to better patient cohorting

IMO has been healthcare’s leader in clinical terminology and comprehensive code mapping for almost 30 years, but we’re also so much more.

We are pleased to announce the launch of IMO Precision Sets – a robust data quality solution that centralizes and simplifies the creation, organization, and ongoing maintenance of value sets (healthcare code groupings).

“We’re extremely excited to bring IMO Precision Sets to the market,” said Mamtha Mishra, Product Manager, IMO. “Healthcare is swimming in a sea of data, and IMO Precision Sets gives our industry the much-needed ability to standardize and sort clinical data to shape the criteria of unique patient groups and evaluate important measures like quality, safety, and timeliness of care.”

The need for precision

Including the right patients in cohorts for quality reporting, research, and clinical trials can impact reimbursement, financials, and clinical results. Yet, finding patients who meet a specific clinical profile is not as easy as it might sound.

Creating and maintaining value sets – which define clinical concepts – is an intricate and time-consuming process. Choosing certain codes from a code system of choice – like ICD-10-CM, SNOMED CT®, or LOINC® – might seem straightforward, but a lack of clinical specificity, disparate data sources, and poor data governance create challenges for even the most sophisticated organizations.

Research conducted in partnership with HIMSS provides insights into the current state of value sets:

• 81% of organizations experience issues with definitions and data ambiguity with no consistent way to define scope and select codes; little distinction between similar value sets; and unclear quality measure requirements.
• 87% of organizations experience issues with process including manual data manipulation that poses a significant drain on time and resources; inconsistent methods to build value sets across departments; no centralized repository; and a lack of automation/awareness for updating codes.

With the myriad of other priorities and challenges organizations face, addressing value set workflows may fall low on the to-do list. However, that quickly changes when considering the pervasiveness of value sets across healthcare.

Almost all organizations – including health systems, health IT companies, life science organizations, payers, health information exchange (HIE) networks, and research institutions – engage with value sets in some way. From direct patient care to improving healthcare’s collective operations and sustainability, value sets are often the key to executing critical uses, such as:

• Population health management
• Quality reporting and improvement
• Clinical decision support
• Interoperability and Meaningful Use
• Clinical trials
• Claims processing
• Health plan member risk and cost assessment
• Epidemiology

Unprecedented value set management

IMO Precision Sets offers a better approach to value set management, streamlining and standardizing the behind-the-scenes efforts of organizations to assemble and preserve groups of problem, diagnosis, lab, medication, and procedure codes.

This solution combines hundreds of ready-to-use value sets with an unmatched editing and maintenance cloud-based tool, enabling professionals – from clinicians to informaticists to data analysts – to spend less time cleaning and cataloging data and more time acting on reliable insights generated using standardized information.

With IMO Precision Sets, organizations will be able to:

Build accurate value sets with streamlined code selection
Users can search for problems, diagnoses, labs, medications, and procedures before confidently isolating the exact codes needed to precisely define clinical concepts and create accurate value sets.

Improve collaboration and maximize staff bandwidth
Users can conveniently access hundreds of out-of-the-box value sets – like the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service’s (CMS) eCQM, NCQA HEDIS®, and IMO-curated value sets – to accelerate data workflows and minimize inconsistencies.

Simplify value set management and support data governance
Users can upload and download existing value sets, and maintain them by reviewing and applying code set updates – creating a definitive data source.