Nine Software Vendors Seek Certification for HEDIS 2006

Published: Tuesday, November 8, 2005 - 22:00

The National Committee for Quality Assurance recently announced that nine commercial software vendors that will seek certification of their Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set (HEDIS)-related software. To evaluate each company’s product, NCQA will give each vendor a number of test cases to process; their output will be compared to expected results to determine if the software properly collects data from health plan databases and calculates accurate results. Four of the nine vendors will also participate in the Limited Software Certification program, which certifies software that produces results for partial or custom measurement sets. Such software is used to meet specialized data reporting and quality improvement needs.

“Companies that create software products that can quickly and accurately calculate and report HEDIS scores provide a critical service to their health plan clients,” says Mary Braman, NCQA director of licensure and certification. “Good software products allow plans to spend less time preparing and reporting data and more time doing what they do best—improving the care they deliver to their members. We commend the vendors committed to this program.”

Certification is voluntary, and vendors which achieve certification are exempt from manual source code review by NCQA auditors during the HEDIS Compliance Audit. Results of the testing will be announced next month.

The testing used in the software certification reviews will include 10 new HEDIS measures, including:

Inappropriate antibiotic treatment for adults with acute bronchitis
Use of spirometry testing in the assessment and diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
Disease-modifying antirheumatic drug therapy in rheumatoid arthritis
Follow-up care for children prescribed attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder medication
Drugs to be avoided in the elderly

The companies participating in the certification program are: Austin Provider Solutions Inc., Catalyst Technologies Inc., DST Health Solutions, Emdeon Business Services, Ingenix, McKesson Health Solutions LLC, ODIS LLC, Q Mark Inc. and TierMed Systems LLC.

For more information, visit www.ncqa.org.

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