“Reach for the Top” Community Health Initiative to Spark Improvements in Health, Care Delivery and Cost

Comparative performance metrics will support the Community Health Data Initiative

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. (June 02, 2010) –

Today Ingenix, in partnership with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), will present a prototype of Reach for the Top, an initiative that will use comparative health performance metrics to encourage improvements in health, health care delivery, and cost of care in communities across the United States.

Reach for the Top is among select initiatives to be demonstrated at the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine (IOM) during the public meeting, Community Health Data Forum: Harnessing the Power of Information to Improve Health. This forum marks the launch of the Community Health Data Initiative (CHDI), a public-private collaboration that encourages innovators to develop applications that use health information to raise awareness of community health performance and spark actions to improve public health. The webcast of this event can be viewed at 9 a.m. Eastern at www.hhs.gov/open.

Reach for the Top is in initial planning stages with support from Ingenix and IHI. It is designed to inspire improvements across three dimensions of care: the health of the population, the individual experience of care, and the cost of care – what IHI calls the Triple AimTM. Reach for the Top will first enable communities to access information from a variety of sources, including commercial and government data, to gain an understanding of their current status by comparison in each of the three dimensions. Communities will then be able to monitor their improvement as they “Reach for the Top” on each metric, comparing results, seeking top performers and learning from best practices.

The Reach for the Top prototype demonstrated today uses information from Ingenix, IHI, the Dartmouth Atlas, County Health Rankings, and the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) to create indices and dashboards that enable communities to see how their performance ranks versus the top 10th percentile of communities in measures of community health – such as birth weight, hospital admissions and re-admissions, emergency room visits, management of chronic conditions, patient-reported quality of life, and years of life lost to death prior to age 75 – and in measures of cost, such as medical cost per person. Reach for the Top metrics will expand as more data become available. Efforts are currently underway to create a planning committee that will develop a competition for communities and hospitals to “Reach for the Top.”

“At Ingenix we believe that actionable information is the key to improving access to, and the quality of, health care, so we welcomed the opportunity to contribute to the Community Health Data Initiative and Reach for the Top. Today’s demonstrations reveal just the beginning of what’s possible when we all – the public sector, private sector, and consumers – collaborate to use information to help us make the best possible health care choices,” said Andy Slavitt, CEO, Ingenix.

Reach for the Top will use the increasing amount of federally-generated community health data being made public through the CHDI. The goal of the CHDI is to help citizens, clinicians and local leaders use data to improve health and the value of health care. As such, the initiative is turning to information technology and application developers to “put our public health information to work.” To learn more about the Community Health Data Initiative, please visit www.hhs.gov/open.

About Ingenix
Ingenix, a UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH) company, is a leading provider of health information, technology and consulting services. Organizations, institutions, businesses and government agencies that comprise the health care system depend on Ingenix solutions and insights to improve their performance. Visit www.ingenix.com for more information.

Source: Ingenix