About Baltimore Health Analytics

BHA has 3 lines of business:

• HEDIS(r) and Stars Software including OCR abstraction (Ocular), fax chase (Pisces), apps to manage member and provider outreach to support Stars (Rover) and some great HEDIS reports.
• Medicare Advantage Plan Consulting - Stars analytics, HEDIS improvement, education, new MA Plan strategic planning.  Project work for health plans and partners.
• Stars Analytics as a Service - Subscription service to tools that give insight into Star Ratings, education, reserach and analytical support.

Since 2017, we've also given away several tools for free -- swag for the internet age.  It's a way to show off our talent for software design and using data to get actionable insight, all while generating some goodwill or karma by providing something useful to the community.

Audience

Our site is for Medicare Advtantage professionals employed by insurers or their partners.  Plus an occasional researcher.

The Star Ratings system is complex, and BHA Stars Tools give the most insight to people already engrossed in Stars.  If you've ever created a spreadsheet to estimate a plan's star rating, you'll love Stars Planner.  If you have a theory about a measure or ratings pattern, Stars Explorer is a great place to look for evidence and other ideas.  

But if that's not you, don't despair.  First, this is a pretty good place to start learning.  We provide tutorials and the ability to see and play around with real data for the insurers you're familar with.  Secondly, the premium SAaaS subscription is a concierge service.  We can teach or just do the work for you.  Cancel anytime.  A month or two of support may be what you need to get going.  

Data Source

We have several kinds of data:

• Star Ratings Detail by contract
• Display measures
• CMS bid benchmarks
• Enrollment 

Our main source of data is CMS.  Go to www.cms.gov and find the "Part C and D Performance Data" and find the annual zip files of Stars data.  In theory you can do the same thing.  You just have to download the same files, manipulate the data into a database and build some tools.  It's a bit of work, but we enjoyed it.  You might too. 

We also get population and display measures data from the same site. That's about it; everything you see is derived from public datasets.

Unfortunately, this means it's also backwards looking. The main data comes out in October of each year reflecting get the annual updates in October of each year with results from the prior year's service.

Tips for BHA Apps

• Hover over detals and links to find tooltips with details.
• CMS changes measure codes each year.  We use our own measure codes that do not change.
• Keep in mind that Star Ratings are assigned to contracts, not to parent companies or to units within a contract (PBPs) or to geographic areas.  Where appropriate, we calculate and use weighted averages.

List of Applications

App and Use Cases	Screens
Stars Planner  (Free) Map out a best path to 4 Stars (or some other goal) Fast way to view a contract's Star Ratings
Stars Explorer Treemap (Free) View All Plans' Star Rtaings at once See relative size of different contracts and parent companies
Stars Explorer - Maps (Subscription) View relative performance geographically See which companies are active in each county and state See the market share of a company by county See financial metrics by county
Star Measures Detail (Free) Quick lookup for the CMS description of each measure. See average stars and scores  View cutpoint trends View histogram of members and plans by Star Rating
Display Measures Detail (Subscription) Quick view of the current list and specs for Display Mesaures
Plan Screener (Subcription) Find plans of interest for marketing purposes Rank plans by performance (or need) on "your" measures, financials, Stars needs, etc.
Company State Report (Subscription) Quickly see all the info we have about a company (parent organization) within a state or group of states. See market share and market leadrehsip by county
Cutpoints and Outliers (Subscription) See 5 years of measure performance statistics See percentiles and Tukey outliers  Make your own predictions

Future

We are adding new subscription apps and features.  In particular, we are looking at new data sources to integrate that will give meaningful insight for Stars planning, marketing and financial analysis.