10 Things You Might Be Surprised to Know About VNS Health’s Data Experts—the Business Intelligence & Analytics (BIA) Team

This article is part of an ongoing series highlighting different teams across VNS Health. Our aim with this series is to enhance the VNS Health employee experience by spotlighting all parts of the organization, revealing things you may not know about another team and bringing our organization closer together. If there is a team that you think should be included in this series, please let us know by clicking here!

VNS Health’s Business Intelligence & Analytics (BIA) department plays a vital role in the organization’s activities. Here are 10 things you may not know about the BIA department:

1) BIA has 46 employees spread across a number of diverse teams.

BIA’s core teams are Data Science (which includes Health Economics), Business Intelligence, Operations, and Business Development Analytics as well as VNS Health’s unique Center for Home Care Policy & Research—the only free-standing, evidence-generating scientific arm to be located within a home- and community-based health care organization. (Frontline recently did a separate article on the Research Center, which you can see by clicking here.)

2) VNS Health’s BIA capabilities are essential to our delivery of high-quality, effective care.

Among other things, BIA evaluates the drivers of clinical outcomes; identifies opportunities for managing risk-based populations; assesses the effectiveness of programs and interventions; determines how quality of care is measured; and uses predictive modeling to identify patient populations in need of clinical interventions. These capabilities are a must-have for VNS Health, notes Chief Analytic Officer Tim Peng, who heads BIA. “In addition to Business Intelligence, Data Science is fast becoming a necessity for integrated health organizations like ours, especially if they include a health insurance product as we do,” says Tim. He also notes that having an internal group with these capabilities—rather than relying vendors—sets VNS Health apart from similar non-profit organizations.

3) The Data Science team uses their expert math skills to turn raw numbers into models that everyone at VNS Health can work with.

The BIA team is known as VNS Health’s data experts. Explaining this data to the rest of us is the job of the Data Science and Health Economics team members. With their expertise in algebra, calculus, and statistical analysis, this group examines and processes complex sets of numbers, then translates those results into a form that’s clear, useful, and user-friendly. Since every department has its own requirements and goals, the analysts do a deep dive into each line of business to understand and meet their specific needs.

4) BIA’s Business Intelligence team creates hundreds of data dashboards that are used every day by VNS Health team members.

The Business Intelligence team empowers our organization by making reliable, accurate data easily accessible by creating interactive dashboard tools that automatically collect, organize and manage key data points—enabling thousands of VNS Health team members to make the right clinical and business decisions each day. Besides designing these dashboards, the Business Intelligence team also helps other teams generate their own dashboards and reports. In 2022 alone, colleagues from throughout the organization have created 267 new self-service dashboards and reports through the mid-year.

5) BIA’s Operations Team is VNS Health’s data pipeline to the New York State and federal governments.

Submitting detailed data on VNS Health’s activities to the New York State Department of Health (DOH) and the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is a huge task—and a critical and mandatory one. BIA’s Operations division, which consists of the Encounters and Regulatory Reporting teams, is in charge of fulfilling these complex requirements. “VNS Health administers benefits on behalf of New York State and CMS, so we have to submit detailed claims data and reports to them for the purposes of rate-setting, risk adjustment, health trends, and other forms of supplemental revenue,” says Ben Edmundson, Associate Vice President of Encounters & Regulatory Reporting. This data also provides the state with important insights into health care trends and challenges, which in turn may affect policy.

6) BIA’s Business Development Analytics team engages with and supports VNS Health’s Business Development team.

This support includes utilizing data to help build, strengthen and deepen the relationships with our provider customers (hospitals, physician practices, nursing facilities, assisted living facilities, etc.) for Home Care and Hospice. Here are some of the things that the team does on a day-to-day basis:

• Creates custom and template Home Care and Hospice volumetric and outcomes reporting specific to the needs of each customer.
• Participates in customer calls to understand what’s important to the customer.
• Consults on the best way to set up back-end data to track important programs/initiatives for the customer and for internal reporting.
• Provides market intelligence on share and competition as well as business opportunities.
• Participates in the budget and reforecast process for Home Care and Hospice to provide guidance on forecasts based on trends affecting business volume (i.e., COVID pandemic, seasonality, etc.).
• Prepares monthly actual-to-target performance summaries for our Home Care and Hospice businesses.

7) BIA works with IT to keep VNS Health’s digital tools up-to-date and user-friendly.

From implementing new systems and platforms to the development of proprietary software, BIA works with VNS Health’s IT team to make sure the organization’s digital tools offer a good user experience. BIA team also streamlines and organizes data into models that can be easily consumed. This often means combining several separate sets of data from different areas into one overall solution that can be shared across different parts of the organization.

8) BIA analyzes how health policies impact our patients and also works to influence policy.

BIA also uses data analysis to understand how changes in health care policy and reimbursements impact VNS Health’s delivery of care to our patients, clients and members. Their analysis often supports the organization’s response to CMS’s proposed rules during the open response period that occurs prior to proposed rules becoming official policy. BIA also works with New York State on Medicaid policy. In fact, Tim Peng was honored by the United Hospital Fund (UHF) with its 2020 Excellence in Health Care Award for work by the BIA team and others at VNS Health to design a fairer Medicaid reimbursement model for the state. Thanks to this new model, VNS Health can now provide comprehensive services to its sickest and most vulnerable members without concerns that it will lose money because of inadequate payments from Medicaid.  Click here to read more about Tim’s award and the team’s achievements.

9) BIA helps VNS Health run more efficiently as a business.

The BIA team works with VNS Health’s business and support teams to provide data-driven insights that help enhance the efficiency of VNS Health’s operations—including optimizing delivery of care through improved care coordination for patients, clients and members, and identifying opportunities for investments and partnerships that will improve patient outcomes while saving the organization money. The team also uses techniques such as time-series forecasting and geospatial analysis to address issues around staffing and scheduling.

10) BIA is helping to develop tools and systems that VNS Health can market to other organizations.

For example, BIA developed the analysis to support the development of the HELPS tool, which uses a patient’s Universal Assessment System (UAS) data to predict how many weeks of personal care services they need. VNS Health is now marketing that tool to other health plans in New York State as the first product offering from our new Professional Solutions team. BIA also has a central role in VNS Health’s participation in the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation’s Value Based Insurance Hospice Benefit pilot. They created a model that predicts the risk of mortality and an algorithm to identify a need for palliative care from health plan claims data. BIA is also partnering with IT to lay the groundwork so that this type of analytical service can be replicated for external organizations.

For additional insights on the BIA team, see the August 2022 episode of “20-Minutes with Dan,” featuring several compelling guests—including BIA head Tim Peng—and discussions about the importance of data.

To learn still more about the BIA team’s work, you can click on these links to visit the Business Intelligence and Data Science landing pages.

bia.vnsny.org

datascience.vnsny.org

To see more photos of the BIA team, click here below.