Most of the ideas that generate our new metrics come in as ideas or questions from our users.

• Ideas for new metrics or features can be submitted by anyone into the Idea Center found in Mosaic and Marketscape.
• Some new metrics come in through user interactions with our Customer Success team or as questions to our Support team.

More information on submitting an idea.

Our Product Teams evaluate and prioritize ideas and requests. Sometimes they consult with users to clarify usage and needs. If the new metric (or feature) is deemed useful and valuable, a lot happens:

• Our UI/UX Experts decide where the new data, or feature will go in Marketscape or Mosaic. We want it to be easy for you to find what you need.
• Our Web Development Team builds the web page so the new metric or feature has a place to go. (And the Quality Assurance Team tests the new design to make sure it works.)
• And, just for kicks, everyone needs to be taught about the new metric or feature.

Now Data Science has a huge job!

• Our Data Scientists decide how to calculate the new metric from the claims data. Some metrics are simple counts for a fixed period, but others require identifying an event on a claim and then pinpointing other events from other claims and counting time periods and making connections. In the end, there are lots of parameters that need to be considered for each metric. And THEN, the data team writes a query that can be used to pull the metric from the raw claims data. Phew!
• CMS checks and approves the results of our query to make sure all Protected Health Information (PHI) is removed from the output. We also run a test:
  • First, we want to make sure we get meaningful metrics. Not every great idea turns into a usable metric.
  • Also, we comb through the test data to confirm that our query returns exactly the metrics we are looking for. If not, we make changes to our query to zero in on the most useful and meaningful metric.
• Once each quarter, when it is ready, the VRDC delivers more than a billion raw claims to us and we run ALL of our needed queries against every submitted Medicare claim. 

This is where the Trella Health "black-box" comes in. The algorithms we use to massage and squeeze the raw data from the claims into what we need is our trade secret. The result, however, is a mammoth collection of patient counts and performance metrics aggregated from every Medicare FFS claim!

It is important to remember that we do more than just provide you with a dump of raw data. After we get the data, we do some careful analysis in order to provide meaningful metrics that tell a specific story. (And some of that analysis is our "secret sauce" that makes us the leader in medical analytics - hence the black box!)

An example: we don't just count every patient discharged from a hospital who was admitted to hospice care in the same year. Although this "raw" count would have some value, we want to focus on referral potential, providing you with the opportunity to act where the potential is high. We count the number of patients entering hospice care within 30 days of discharge in order to identify a "logical" connection between the hospital and admission to hospice care.

Finally, the thousands of resulting counts and scores and percentages are organized into pages and tables in a way that is easy to browse, sort, filter and discover.

In this way, the metric you originally requested is drawn out of the mass of data collected from all Medicare claims and displayed in Marketscape or Mosaic for you to use.

Data Source

Supplier

Coverage

Frequency

Latency

Example Metrics

Medicare Fee for Service – Part A

CMS – VRDC

100%

Quarterly*

~5 Months*

Facility Metrics; Sources and Destinations

Medicare Fee for Service – Part B

CMS -VRDC

100%

Quarterly*

~5 Months*

Physician Patient Diagnostic Mix; Claim Categories

Medicare Advantage – Part C

CMS - VRDC

100%

Yearly

2 Years

Medicare Advantage Patient Volume by Payer

Medicare Advantage / Commercial 65+

Claims Aggregator

Varies**

Quarterly

~5 Months

Medicare Advantage/Commercial (Age 65+) Patient Volume

Data Source

Supplier

Coverage

Frequency

Latency

Example Metrics

Master Beneficiary Summary File

CMS – VRDC

100%

Quarterly

~5 Months*

Medicare Enrollees by County

ACO Attribution

CMS - VRDC

100%

Quarterly

~5 Months*

Provider ACO Participation

CMS Compare

CMS – Care Compare

100%

Quarterly

Per CMS

Star ratings; SNF bed count

NPI Registry

CMS - NNPES

100%

Quarterly

N/A

Provider address and Physician Specialty

You can submit an idea for Marketscape or Mosaic from within the product.

Click on the question mark in the circle at the bottom right of any page.

Click on "Submit an Idea!"

This will open a new window, and you will want to click on the appropriate button - either Marketscape Idea Center, or Mosaic Idea Center

This will take you to the idea center.

It is likely that you will need to set up an account.

Once you have set up an account, you will want to click on "Add a new idea."

Although the image to the right shows the Marketscape Idea Center, the Mosaic Idea Center is the same.

Follow the instructions to add you idea.