Current Project Opportunities

MNCM Project Opportunities – June 2023

As a multi-stakeholder nonprofit that seeks to drive health care improvement, MN Community Measurement (MNCM) has built a strong foundation as a trusted source of data to support health care transparency and accountability.

Consistent with MNCM’s mission of empowering health care decision makers with data to drive improvement, MNCM stakeholders have several opportunities for new ways to engage with MNCM.

Each of these opportunities is described in more detail below. Contact support@mncm.org for more information about how to participate.

CHIRP
(Common Health Information Reporting Partnership)

  • What is it? CHIRP is an MNCM program that has been established to facilitate data sharing between health care payers and providers for specified use cases that have been defined and agreed upon by the multi-stakeholder CHIRP Governance Committee. The CHIRP program is founded on the principle that for data to be meaningful to stakeholders in today’s environment, it needs to be as timely, actionable, consistent, and complete as possible to deliver the highest value. The provider to payer component of CHIRP leverages MNCM’s existing PIPE data standard to facilitate clinical data sharing, and the payer to provider component is currently being refined by the CHIRP Governance Committee.
  • Who can participate? CHIRP participation is open to all providers and payers that have completed onboarding to PIPE. Medical groups will have the opportunity to designate which payers they agree to share clinical data with. Participating payers that receive clinical data through CHIRP will pay a fee to cover MNCM’s costs of administering the program.
  • What data are being shared? The clinical data elements shared are defined in the CHIRP Provider-to-Payer Data Standard, and include a subset of the data providers submit to MNCM via PIPE. The CHIRP Governance Committee has determined the included data elements are the minimum necessary information for care management, quality measurement, and risk adjustment.
  • What are the benefits? The main anticipated benefits of CHIRP to both payers and providers are 1) more timely, consistent and actionable information to drive quality improvement efforts, and 2) efficiency, reduced burden, and cost savings from fewer chart chases required for HEDIS measurement.
  • What is required to participate? Both payers and providers must be onboarded to PIPE and will need to sign an addendum to their Data Use Agreements with MNCM. The addenda confirm participants agree to abide by the program policies and procedures adopted by the CHIRP Governance Committee, including submitting necessary data on a regular cadence to ensure successful data exchange. The provider addendum authorizes MNCM to share the data in the CHIRP standard and designate which payers MNCM is authorized to send data to. The payer addendum defines the terms of the subscription agreement and establishes fees. To maximize the benefits to both payers and providers, MNCM is pursuing certification through the NCQA Data Aggregator Validation (DAV) program. Participating providers will need to partner with MNCM in conducting primary source verification during the validation process.

Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD)
Dashboard Project

  • What is it? The CKD Dashboard Project is a 3-year project launched in early 2023 as an effort to develop and provide medical groups with analysis, data tools, and support for improving screening, diagnosis, and treatment of CKD in patients with diabetes. A multi-stakeholder Dashboard Project Advisory Committee is currently advising on the creation of the dashboard, which will launch later this year. In addition to the data dashboard, the project also includes regular opportunities for participating medical groups to share resources and learn from each other’s successes and challenges. The project is funded by Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals and is being conducted in accordance with MNCM’s Guidelines for Engagement of Commercial Interests.
  • Who can participate? Any medical group that has completed onboarding to PIPE can participate in the CKD Dashboard. There is no cost to participate, and medical groups will gain access to valuable information to help prevent, identify, and manage CKD in their patients with diabetes.
  • What are the benefits? An estimated 36 percent of adults with diabetes have CKD, but only a small share of them have been diagnosed. There are substantial opportunities to improve screening, diagnosis, and management of CKD in patients with diabetes that will result in better outcomes for patients.
  • What is required to participate? Medical groups that have onboarded to PIPE may opt-in to the CKD Dashboard Project by

Special Projects and Research

  • What kinds of opportunities does this include? From time to time, MNCM participates in special projects and research that are closely related to our nonprofit mission of leveraging data to drive improvement in health care quality, cost, and equity. Examples include:
    • Measure Development and Testing Projects
      MNCM is involved in a new project with HealthPartners/ International Diabetes Center to evaluate the feasibility of obtaining and using patient wearable continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) data to measure blood glucose management. Additionally, the project includes the selection of the best CGM metrics to correlate with the standard lab HbA1c.
    • Multi-year Collaborative Research Projects
      For the MNCARES project, MNCM is partnering with HealthPartners Institute and the Minnesota Department of Health to study alternative approaches to care coordination.
    • Facilitated Participation in Research
      MNCM is also partnering with the Minnesota Electronic Health Records Consortium to enable participation in research projects by medical groups that do not have the infrastructure and resources to participate directly. Participation in the MN Electronic Health Records Consortium via MNCM helps to ensure that smaller providers and those serving patients who are mostly like to experience health disparities -- such as populations of color or people living in rural areas – are adequately represented in research.
  • Who can participate? This varies depending on the project.
  • What are the benefits? Participation in special projects like research and measure development that are aligned to MNCM’s nonprofit mission helps to advance improvements in health care quality, cost, and equity by creating more meaningful measures of quality and contributing to knowledge about what improvement strategies work best.
  • What is required to participate? Some special projects leverage data already submitted to MNCM, and some require additional data collection. In general, it is anticipated that the PIPE data system will make it much easier for medical groups to participate in special projects by authorizing MNCM to use existing data submissions in this way on a project by project basis. For purposes not already authorized in existing Data Use Agreements, MNCM will seek specific authorization from data contributors to use their data for special projects.