SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Clarify Health, a leading healthcare analytics and value-based payments platform company, announced the release of a no-code query engine within its Clarify Rates product, a price transparency intelligence software. Payers and providers can now instantly query 500+ terabytes of enriched price transparency data via the software’s user interface and generate reports on market prices in seconds. The Clarify Rates product contains institutional and professional rates from over 65 national and regional payers, including United Healthcare, Cigna, Aetna CVS, Humana, and many Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) payers, and is constantly adding new data as it is released, providing access to the most comprehensive and up-to-date rate intelligence on the market.
“This unlocks the usability of the price transparency data,” commented Niall Brennan, Clarify’s chief analytics and privacy officer and head of the Clarify Health Institute. “It provides a business user on-demand, no-code access to the entirety of Clarify’s over 500 terabyte data set without needing a fully staffed data team to ingest, clean, and analyze it from massive and complex raw source files.”
Raw price transparency data contains trillions of records, is inconsistently formatted, includes gaps in reporting, and paints a convoluted picture of healthcare pricing in the commercial market today. Aside from its no-code query engine, what makes Clarify Rates unique is its enriched rates data. By enriching raw rates with claims data on 300M+ annual lives, the product displays prices that have been billed instead of millions of meaningless prices. Clarify’s data enrichment methodology uses claims volume to determine utilization and remove "zombie rates," rates that are reported for providers who never have and would never provide certain services. The methodology also maps standard codes to service lines, estimates Medicare payments for those services, and calculates rates as a percentage of the Medicare payment. Additionally, by integrating insights from claims alongside rates data, Clarify adds the critical dimensions of service mix and volume. This enables the display of the weighted percent of Medicare prices (versus straight average) so users can better inform their understanding of the true economics and value delivered.
Users can also compare sourced rates across services, providers, and payers in any given market to quickly receive insight on their competitive negotiated rate standing against their peers. “Well organized price transparency data creates a new and essential category of business intelligence across the industry,” commented Clarify Founder and CEO Jean Drouin, MD. “The impact goes far beyond payer-provider negotiations. When integrated with referrals, utilization, and quality data, price transparency information unlocks more precise and actionable insights on growth, partnership, and cost-effective choices.”
Price transparency data coverage and quality
Since 2015, the Clarify Platform® has been managing massive data sets using big data efficiencies that are commonplace in the consumer and financial industries and provided the perfect infrastructure to handle the size and scale of price transparency data. Clarify has processed, analyzed, and compared data from approximately 5,600 hospitals and all large national payers since the inception of each data set to assess quality differences between the data sets. Here is what we have observed:
- Health plans are more compliant with price transparency regulations than hospitals, resulting in higher data coverage found across payer-sourced data.
- Hospital-sourced rates data is limited to hospital services (e.g., it is missing professional and ambulatory services). In contrast, more than 90% of unique negotiated rates reported by health plans reflect rates negotiated with professionals.
- Notably, CMS also did not require a standard schema for hospital machine-readable files (MRF) formatting, whereas health plans must follow a defined schema. This has led to a broader variation in hospital reporting format and quality.
Clarify at HIMSS
Niall Brennan will be leading a session at HIMSS where he will be sharing an analysis of the quality of price transparency data based on research conducted by the Clarify Health Institute, which assessed 500+ terabytes of rates data from 5,600 hospitals and 65+ payers. You can learn more about Clarify’s presence at HIMSS23 here: https://clarifyhealth.com/himss2023/.
About Clarify Health
Clarify Health is an enterprise analytics and value-based payments platform company that empowers payers, providers, and life sciences companies to deliver better care, therapies, and outcomes with actionable patient journey insights. Clarify’s cloud-based business applications are built on the Clarify Atlas Platform, which maps 300M+ patient journeys to deliver 18B+ AI-powered predictions and surface insights with speed and precision. Clarify’s products illuminate actionable opportunities to drive growth, optimize networks, improve care delivery, manage population health, maximize value-based care performance, and bring therapies to market. With Clarify, healthcare organizations can leapfrog from point-solution and manual analytics to self-service, rapid generation of enterprise insights that light the path to better care and outcomes.
