Lessons Learned in Providing Claims-Based Data to Participants in Health Care Innovation Models

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has been providing data to organizations participating in a range of innovation models to help them implement interventions and to provide feedback on performance. The authors studied 18 CMS models to gain a better understanding of factors contributing to model participants' use or nonuse of CMS-provided data. Factors that contribute to greater use include providing data that participants view as actionable, some type of accountability for performance, robust learning support, participants having resources to work with the data, and soliciting ongoing feedback about the data and related learning needs. Factors that discourage data uptake include time lag, lack of aggregated multi-payer data, exclusion of data for sensitive diagnoses, and small sample sizes. Claims-based data from payers can be an important source of information to innovation model participants. Lessons from this study can increase the usefulness of such data.