Quality & Performance Improvement

 Telehealth Performance and Quality Improvement Toolkit

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly accelerated the growth of telehealth programs.  Such growth comes with both challenges and opportunities.  Existing programs are expanding rapidly, and new programs are being created. Ambulatory care practices/clinics, including safety net providers like FQHCs and RHCs, are continuously making decisions about whether to invest, how much to invest and how to measure the impact of their investment in digital health technologies and processes within their practice settings.  In response, MATRC has teamed up with Ignis Health to develop a set of telehealth data visualization tools.  The objectives of this project are to:

1. Create a framework for educating end-users about key considerations when making decisions about investing in digital health technologies; including the viability of starting new telehealth programs, expanding existing telehealth programs and/or implementing hybrid program models.
2. Create a framework for helping end-users think broadly about telehealth as a tool for quality improvement; including opportunities for telehealth to enhance safety, timeliness, effectiveness, efficiency, equity and patient-centric care for a variety of populations, sub-populations and conditions.
3. Create a space where users (individuals, organizations, and agencies) can participate and enrich the data set with their own data.  A data upload feature is coming soon!  Contact Us if you would be interested in adding and visualizing your own data set.

This initial dataset (provided through Laurel Health Advisors) was collected from six large health systems and one state Medicaid program. The data represent 1.43 million ambulatory care telehealth encounters that took place between March and September 2020 with patients in rural and urban areas across all 50 states. The dataset contains the following data elements:

• Month of Encounter
• Zip Code of Originating Site
• Diagnoses
• Procedures
• Laboratory Orders
• Medication Orders
• Payor/Insurer
• Amount Charged by/to the Program

We invite you to explore these data by using the following four interactive tools.  These were created to allow users to explore the data and better understand relevant metrics for their own programs.  A single dashboard contains multiple visualizations which can be customized using the filtering and/or drilldown functions.  View Toolkit Users Guide.  A user can employ these capabilities to narrow the scope of the data to the specific telehealth services and use cases of greatest interest:

• Telehealth Data Exploration Tool: This tool allows users to interact with the depth and breadth of the full dataset.

• Telehealth Diagnoses and Procedure Codes Tool: This tool allows users to interact with the variety of diagnoses and procedure codes for telehealth encounters; enabling users to view the codes by gender, age, rurality, location and more.

• Telehealth Billing Tool:  This tool allows users to interact with data related to charges billed to a variety of payors and payor types by diagnoses and procedure codes.

• Telehealth Location Analysis Tool:  This tool allows users to interact with telehealth service utilization data, enabling users to view these data based on the geographic location of the patient.