ICF is helping the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) deliver on their mission—to improve health outcomes—by applying data analytics and health IT expertise to advance the kidney transplant process.
How can CMS better support kidney patients and connect them to the lifesaving transplants they need? By leveraging health IT and scientific support expertise, under the leadership of CMS, ICF is supporting the evolution of CMS’ End Stage Renal Disease Quality Reporting System (EQRS) to drive improved health outcomes and advance the kidney transplant process for patients, doctors, and social workers across the country.
Challenge
EQRS serves as a registry for CMS to collect end-stage renal disease patient data with the ultimate goal of improving the quality of patient care and reducing cost. This data covers dialysis and kidney transplants, as well as information relevant to Medicare claims and eligibility. As patients move, switch providers, or experience changes in health, CMS needed a way for EQRS to make health IT data more accessible and actionable to a wide variety of healthcare providers and social workers—to ensure patients get the tests they need and stay as healthy as possible while waiting for a kidney match. Modernizing the current EQRS system to onboard healthcare providers from transplant centers to the registry, give them specialized access, and provide more robust data analytics will help to facilitate an expedited and lifesaving transplant process for patients.
Solution
Working with CMS, ICF paired their technical domain expertise with human-centered design to build a solution for multiple stakeholders, including CMS, transplant centers, dialysis organizations, physicians, and social workers. Leveraging AWS cloud infrastructure, the team built an architecture that synthesizes large amounts of data, which allows patients to more quickly match with service providers to expedite care and the kidney transplant process.
With the help of a consolidated dashboard, stakeholders no longer have to investigate and inquire across waitlists, centers, and other facilities—saving valuable time.
To ensure CMS was building the right solution from the beginning, CMS assembled a team of stakeholders that included subject-matter experts in EQRS, representatives from all end user groups, and ICF’s engineers. This collaboration continued as the solution progressed, helping to define requirements and modernize EQRS with end users and mission outcomes in mind.
“Key to our success on EQRS is a product management mindset to the design and delivery of these digital products. We embrace a user-centered approach that prioritizes building excellent experiences that drive mission outcomes.” – Patrick McConnell, ICF senior vice president, health engineering solutions
Where we are now
For the first time, 225 transplant centers in the U.S. have unprecedented access to EQRS data, allowing them to increase quality of care and improve access to transplant waitlists and relevant transplant preparation, and providing hope to over half a million dialysis patients. As an interface between the CMS, Social Security Administration, and end-stage renal disease dialysis and clinical providers, the modernized EQRS system increases accessibility to actionable data for tens of thousands of patients across the country. It manages patient records, ensuring seamless coordination of care; automates the collection of millions of healthcare quality records annually from dialysis organizations, providing vital insights; and supports transplant centers that play a crucial role in the journey towards a kidney transplant for over 75,000 waitlisted patients.
The next phase of this work is scaling information-gathering capabilities in the cloud to make data more accessible for patients during the initial referral and evaluation stage.
Learn more about how ICF is combining deep domain expertise with leading-edge technologies, advanced analytics, and human-centered practices to help federal agencies design technology solutions that reduce time-to-value.
