Fact
Significant dollars can be saved by getting injured workers to the best doctor. Evidence supporting this fact is the mounting Workers' Comp industry research clearly stating treatment by well-informed and well-intentioned medical doctors results in lower costs and better outcomes.
Belaboring A Point
As repeatedly stated in this series, many doctors in networks are not well-informed or well-intentioned regarding management of Workers' Comp claimants. As a consequence of their involvement, claim results are lacking, costs are high, and outcomes are precarious. This series of articles, "Tips for Building a WC Medical Provider A Team," is intended to describe how to identify doctors who know the ropes in Workers' Comp using indicators in the data.1
Beyond the indicators discussed in the previous articles in this series, additional salient data elements are available in the data to broaden the scope of medical management evaluation. What makes this approach so feasible is that solid knowledge of who demonstrates best practices is revealed in the data. However, to find that knowledge, some operational processes and the data itself need refinement. Access to the data and its quality must be addressed.
Getting To The Knowledge In The Data
Regrettably, access to the data by the right persons is often a problem. Those who know best what to look for, the business and clinical professionals, cannot use current data in a practical, work-in-progress manner. The reasons are many.
First, relevant data resides in separate databases that must be integrated to understand all activity in a claim. Moreover, in most organizations, provider records are simply inaccurate and incomplete. Until now, the need for them was for reimbursement purposes only, not performance evaluation. Yet another problem is that provider records are frequently duplicated in the data, making it difficult to accurately evaluate individual medical providers' treatment process and results.
Data Silos
Critical data for analyzing medical provider performance is still fragmented in most payer organizations. While people have long complained about data silos in Workers' Comp, little has been done to correct the problem. If anything, data sources have increased. Pharmacy databases have been added, for instance. Yet the databases are not integrated on the claim level, thereby portraying the claim as a whole. Data silos too often lead those who are attempting to evaluate provider performance to rely on a single data source.
Single Source Analysis
Relying on one source of provider performance data is foolhardy. Nevertheless, bill review data is often used, but by itself is inadequate to tell the whole story. Claims level data is also critical to weigh return to work data, indemnity payments, and legal involvement associated with claims and ultimately, to individual doctors. None of these data items are found in bill review data, yet these are essential to complete analysis of provider performance. Because in Workers' Comp, doctors drive the non-medical claim costs as well as the direct medical costs, these data items are essential to evaluating the quality of their performance.
Data Quality
The problem of data quality can be even stickier. Traditionally, medical provider records are kept in the claims database, along with records of other vendors for payment purposes. All that is needed for bill payment is a name, address, and tax ID. Unfortunately, the same provider is frequently added to the database when a new bill is received. This outdated database management practice leads to slightly different records added for the same provider.
Data Optimization
To evaluate medical provider performance, more information about individual providers is needed such as accurate physical addresses. PO Boxes will suffice for mailing checks, but injured workers cannot be sent there for treatment.
Merge Duplicate Records
Tax ID's are still important for reimbursement and 1099 purposes, but often multiple doctors are represented by one Tax ID. To evaluate provider performance, individuals must be differentiated in the data. State medical license numbers and NPI (National Provider Identification) numbers are needed. Frankly, some doctors deliberately obfuscate the data by operating under multiple Tax ID's and multiple NPI numbers. Consequently, provider records must be merged, scrubbed, and optimized before any analysis can begin.
What To Do
For most organizations, choosing best practice providers by analyzing the data is challenged by the shortage of accurate and complete data. Therefore, those wanting to control costs by choosing the best providers should obtain provider performance analysis and scoring from a specialty third party, one that is expert in data integration from multiple sources, as well as provider data scrubbing and optimization.
When behaviors of doctors are analyzed using clean, integrated data, the well-informed and well-intentioned in Workers' Comp will rise to the surface.
1 Tips for Building a Medical Provider "A" Team and More Tips for Building a WC Medical Provider "A Team"
