AHIP2023 Takeaway: Usable Data Is the Missing Ingredient to Scale Strategic Efforts from Improving Equity to Experience

The passion for alternative healthcare delivery models, strategies and technologies among payers attending AHIP2023, the top annual conference for health insurance, wasn’t any less enthusiastic than years past.?

In fact, it seems like the presentations and conversations about making gains in value-based care and other strategic change have dominated this conference historically, but where I ask is our industry’s progress??

Until healthcare solves its data problem, payers will end up largely spinning their wheels, with monumental consequences for all healthcare stakeholders.

It seems many of the AHIP presenters agree with me and my Abacus Insights colleagues. ?Whether discussing the potential of artificial intelligence or describing longer-term efforts on VBC and expanded access and equity, a vast majority of presenters cited the persistent and consistent challenge of problematic healthcare data.

Ignoring poor data doesn’t work.

It’s universally acknowledged that healthcare data is awful—old, inaccurate, redundant, incomplete and locked away in diverse formats and systems.

Yet solving the data problem seems so daunting that many payers are glossing over it, leapfrogging to developing and launching new approaches and tools that rely on this questionable data.

But this approach has a fatal flaw. A foundation of sand will eventually collapse, no matter how strong the scaffolding whether they are new tools and technologies, operating and care delivery models or strategies.

The answer is not AI or the next silver bullet, whatever that may be. See Usable Data Is the Key to Realizing the Promise of AI in Healthcare.

Training AI with bad data skews performance, stunting its real potential. Pushing bad data into analytic models to sort into cohorts and patterns does not lead to reliable insights. Bad data delivers bad analyses, decisions, pricing, risk scores, network coverage and much more.

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The power of usable data

While we can all agree healthcare data is bad, what constitutes good data?

At Abacus Insights, we and our payer clients including Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and Cambia Health Solutions believe the answer is usable data that’s interoperable. Usable data has six qualities—accurate, complete, timely, relevant, versatile and use case and application agnostic.?

Clients leverage Abacus Insights’ data transformation platform and data solutions, including risk adjustment, cost of care management, CMS interoperability, and clinical data, that make data usable to improve member experience, enhance operations, power analytics and innovation, strengthen provider relationships and manage vendors.

Please let me know if you agree that usable data is the missing ingredient to rapidly improving healthcare and contact me if you’d like to learn how usable data can give you the foundation for realizing better care, equity, member and provider experience, health outcomes and affordability.?