MultiCare Health’s accountable care arm has taken up the newly launched Tuva Health’s open-source enterprise data platform to do better analytics for value-based care at a fraction of the cost.
MultiCare Health is a health system in the Pacific Northwest. Its ACO, MultiCare Connected Care (MCC) has risk contracts with payers and cares for roughly 375,000 unique members in the Seattle-Tacoma area.
In addition to its partnership with Tuva, the investment arm of the health system, MultiCare Capital Partners, invested in the startup to bring its total funding to $6 million.
Accountable care organizations are responsible for managing the total cost of care per patient. Having outgrown an old data platform that was built for fee-for-service care, MCC set out to build its own enterprise data platform to measure total cost of care, utilization rates, emergency department utilization and hospital admission rates, among other things.
Anna Taylor, associate vice president of population health and value-based care at MCC, explained that while value-based care aims to lower costs, the data systems that enable it are often too expensive to be practical.
“A lot of the problems and what I'm trying to solve for in value-based care and population health require pretty sophisticated computing capabilities, and they're not technologies that healthcare have always had access to because they're too expensive,” Taylor said.
MCC also participates in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation lab’s ACO Reach model, which requires them to collect additional demographic data and social determinants of health data.
Such a build could potentially take years, Tuva Health’s CEO and co-founder Aaron Neiderhiser said in an interview.
“Tuva is helping us achieve that lower cost by being open source and meeting all our requirements so we didn't have to compromise on the house we were buying, and doing it in a way that enables us to have a way to get a lower PMPM (per member per month) cost on our usage,” Taylor said.
According to initial analysis from MCC's actuaries, Tuva may be two times lower cost than other solutions on the market.
The Tuva Project maintains open-source data models and data pipelines that transform raw healthcare data into usable data for research and analytics. On the open-source platform, Tuva explains different dashboards that can be built with its tools—like dashboards for cost drivers, data quality, population insights and quality measure—and offers the code to users.
Healthcare organizations can also pay for additional services by Tuva Health that can compound the benefit of the platform or address an organization's unique needs.
Since Tuva Health's public launch in December, the platform has grown to 1,700 individual contributors, which are most often data scientists from individual healthcare organizations, that help improve the model. About 40 organizations use Tuva as their enterprise data model.
Tuva maintains data sets such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Social Vulnerability Index, which the Trump administration took offline. The database can still be accessed through Tuva, its CEO said.
An MCC data scientist found Tuva's open-source community and saw that its pipelines may be a fit for the organization’s needs. “We needed something that was going to enable us to do the type of intelligence that we needed to do for all of the patients that we serve, not just the ones we might take full capitation on or have the highest risk on, but even for lives that we might just get a bonus for closing a flu shot gap or a colonoscopy screening,” Taylor explained.
“We can customize anything, it meets all of our needs, but we're not going to have to rebuild a lot of this stuff from scratch,” Taylor continued.
This was part of the premise of the founding of the company, when co-founders Neiderhiser and Coco Zuloaga realized they were working on building the same data analytics products at separate healthcare companies.
“This cost drivers dashboard basically lets you slice and dice your spend and utilization for a population,” Neiderhiser said. “This type of analytics, where you can drill in and try to figure out what types of utilization are driving costs, it's pretty important.”
Neiderhiser further explained that value-based care organizations receive claims data from their contracts with payers, but the data can often be messy and presented in different formats, he said. Regardless of missing data and data quality issues, ACOs must use the data to prove cost savings.
With Tuva, ACOs can perform data management functions and data transformation in-house and modify the platform down to the code level.
On top of the open-source data and code, Tuva Health is building out a suite of closed source products around its open-source products that will be announced later in the year.