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Quality Metrics: How Amino determines quality of care

September 22, 2022
Madi Hornig

Quality of care is central to all we do at Amino. Find out how we identify high-quality care, how it's displayed to members and why we think its absence is a miss in price transparency.

The importance of quality transparency

As healthcare costs continue to rise, so does the push for healthcare consumerism through increased price transparency.

While cost information may empower patients to shop for care, studies show that without information around the quality of care, there may be adverse effects on overall healthcare spend. A recent behavioral study found that patients consistently formed price-based inferences of quality when choosing a provider with cost information. Without transparency into a provider's quality of care, we will likely see a continued increase in healthcare costs as patients correlate high-cost providers with high-quality care.

Unfortunately, objective and accurate quality information is difficult to find. Patients are left to sift through internet reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations to form an opinion of a provider’s quality.

Amino Health’s platform addresses this problem by bringing together cost and quality information with an intuitive user experience to provide members with proven high-quality, cost-effective recommendations whenever they search for care.

How does Amino identify high-quality care?

Amino defines high-quality care as safe, effective and responsive to individual patient preferences. Our data-driven approach to identifying high-quality providers, or Smart Matches, includes the analysis of over 26 billion claims and modeling of over 200 quality of care measures from a wide range of datasets—representing over 2 million providers spanning all 50 states.

We are the only health tech company certified by Medicare to create quality measures. Our proprietary measures look at a range of quality metrics including appropriateness of care, level of experience, and quality of health outcomes, and we partnered with clinical advisors to ensure each measure is supported by accurate data and medical guidelines.

When evaluating the quality of a specific provider or facility, we will only use quality measures that are relevant to the member’s search. For example, when determining the quality of a facility before an MRI, we would not take into account the mortality rate, but may use this information in the context of a more dangerous procedure.

Using this methodology, we are able to evaluate the quality of care for millions of providers nationwide.

How is quality information displayed to members?

We take on the role of healthcare experts so your members don’t have to be. Our intuitive user experience brings together our cost and quality analysis with a member’s plan and benefits information to guide members to the right care at the right time.

With over 1,800 consumer-friendly search terms, a member can find high-quality, cost-effective care recommendations for a topic as simple as “back pain” to as specific as a procedural code. We showcase our quality analysis to members through an easily-understood scale ranging from A - F. Members can learn more about a provider’s experience level and quality analysis across a variety of criteria relevant to their search from the provider’s profile.

Amino’s platform guides plan members to higher quality care, creating a happier, healthier workforce. Want to learn more? Get a demo with us here.

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