How MultiCare is using FHIR to transform Medicare quality reporting

How many hours does your team spend preparing reports for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services? How many people does it usually involve? For most healthcare organizations, the answer to both is likely “too many.” The administrative burden and costs associated with quality reporting grows as the reportable patient population grows, creating an unsustainable model.

At MultiCare Health System, based in Tacoma, WA, this challenge was front and center. To meet these demands while improving care delivery, MultiCare partnered with Infor™ to pilot a revolutionary approach leveraging FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) and cloud-native analytics.

This blog explores how MultiCare drastically reduced the time and effort required for Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) reporting, while maintaining high-quality, reliable data.

Why MSSP quality reporting is so challenging

Reporting quality measures for MSSP is much more than a compliance task, it’s about gaining a deep understanding of patient populations, care gaps, and health outcomes. Yet producing these reports is anything but simple due to:

• Interoperability challenges: MultiCare’s patient data, like many other health systems, spanned multiple EHR vendors, including Epic, eClinicalWorks, and NextGen. Legacy systems and varying data standards make seamless data aggregation difficult.
• Data quality and completeness issues: Critical data elements, such as labs and demographics, are often incomplete or inconsistently captured.
• Limited analytic tools: Many existing platforms lack the ability to provide real-time, scalable population health analytics that facilitate care gap identification and proactive interventions.
• Administrative burden and cost: Traditional chart reviews and manual abstraction can cost upward of $50 per chart, not to mention the extensive staff time required.

Why FHIR is the key to enhanced reporting

FHIR is an open standard for healthcare data exchange designed to enable interoperability by allowing disparate systems to communicate using common APIs. MultiCare’s approach harnessed bulk FHIR and a cloud-based technical infrastructure to:

• Aggregate patient data from multiple EHRs into a unified FHIR data store.
• Automate quality measure calculations using Infor Population Health Analytics (IPHA) platform.
• Provide scalable, near real-time reporting with high data integrity, meeting CMS’s regulated API requirements.

Unlocking powerful insights and value with Infor Population Health Analytics

Once the data is converted into a unified FHIR format, MultiCare leveraged Infor Population Health Analytics (IPHA) platform to automate and streamline MSSP quality reporting, delivering significant benefits:

Effortless quality metrics

Across the full scope and duration of the project, MultiCare reduced the required effort to just 3.5 full-time equivalents (FTEs), spanning technical, project, and operational teams.

Calculations at scale

MultiCare now plans to update data quarterly — with ambitions to move to weekly or even daily updates — enabling timely insights and interventions. The platform scales seamlessly from calculating quality measures on samples of 500 patients to thousands, currently covering approximately 13,000 lives. 

Real-time clinical insights 

Access to up-to-date clinical data supports precise, near real-time quality measure calculations, empowering faster, more informed decisions that help prevent complications and reduce care costs.

Actionable analytics

Detailed explanations behind each quality metric help MultiCare understand the “why” behind the results, enabling targeted strategies to effectively close care gaps and improve patient outcomes.

Looking ahead: The future of quality reporting

MultiCare’s success demonstrates how open standards like FHIR, and cloud-native platforms are reshaping healthcare quality reporting. As CMS moves toward requiring 100% population coverage for select measures by 2026, automated, scalable solutions, like the one enabled by Infor Population Health Analytics, will be essential for organizations aiming to reduce administrative burden and refocus efforts on improving patient outcomes. This approach doesn’t just support compliance; it empowers health systems to unlock real-time insights, close care gaps, and deliver higher-value care, making it the ideal model for the future of quality reporting.  

Learn how Infor can help your organization streamline quality reporting and drive better outcomes with less effort.