IT and Data Priorities at CMS

During the second day of AFCEA Bethesda’s annual Federal Health IT Summit, five CMS IT executives participated in a panel discussion about their priorities, challenges, and key initiatives.  Several themes emerged from their discussion including the importance of data, data quality, data standardization, consolidation of data sources, workforce bandwidth and skills, automation, and industry partnerships.

Priorities at the Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services (CMCS) include providing coverage access after the public health emergency ends and furthering health equity, according to Karen Shields, CMCS Deputy Director. Data is an important aspect of these efforts.

At the CMS Human Capital Office (HCO), Tia Butler, Chief Human Capital Officer, said her office is a trusted partner in advancing health equity and finding talent with health equity experience. On a broader scale, her office is also working on implementing a data hub with interfaces to integrate the various sources of employee data and present it in an understandable and useful manner.

When it comes to the health equity program, one of the biggest challenges for Jeneen Iwugo’s organization, the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality (CCSQ), is identifying an appropriate health data source.  In order to support quality measurement and improvement efforts, they need ready access to data.  Another data challenge for CCSQ is displaying data in such a way that it serves a broad spectrum of users from policy experts to clinicians. To solve this problem they employed a suite of different dashboards.

According to Shields, the number one challenge with Medicaid data is quality.  Medicaid is a state program.  States prioritize the quality of the data they need for their sister agencies within their state.  CMCS uses a number of incentives to motivate states to collaborate with them for quality data at the federal level. Additionally, the large number of data sources, the states, is another big challenge.

When asked which pandemic-driven projects in their organizations provided the greatest return on investment in terms of value, migrating to cloud computing environments provided benefits to all the organizations on the panel. CCSQ migrated all its systems to the cloud, resulting in savings of $35M per year. All of its IT systems now reside in the cloud. Laura Lanford, Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) CTO, said her organization is also transitioning systems to the cloud, consolidating data sources internally, and looking at implementing a data lake and data mesh to make data available to users.

In the area of automation, CMMI is implementing automation to consolidate data ingestion points to make it easier to ingest accurate data.  The current process involves a large amount of manual work. According to the panel moderator, Bobby Saxon, CMS Deputy CIO of IT, the agency created an automation advisory board to advise and guide automation efforts. Butler’s office is using Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for human resources awards and is looking at AI for validating applicant qualifications. CCSQ uses AI to digest comments they receive for rules and proposed rules. Often they receive thousands of comments. Employing AI to summarize comments by category will make the process faster and relieve manual workloads.

Panelists said industry could help their agencies by following policy and legislative initiatives. Any policy changes affecting agencies are likely tied to a system, contract, or potential contract. Additionally, Shields said for industry to “let us know when we are in the way, early and often.” Iwugo instructed industry to bring solutions in a format that can be modified for the federal environment. Saxon said, “We need industry to come in as creative, innovative, visionary thinkers.  Industry may have more creative ideas than we do.”