What To Look For In a Value-Based Care Consultant

Many healthcare organizations do not have teams capable of analyzing data for CMS audits, incentive programs, and improvement plans. 

While these tasks are valuable, they tend to be labor-intensive.

We spoke with a leader in leveraging health data, Chirpy Bird Health IT Consulting, to understand how they make that process easier and what you should look for when evaluating consultants.

Meet Health IT Strategist Joy Rios

We interviewed Joy Rios, CEO of Chirpy Bird Health IT Consulting and Host of HIT Like a Girl Podcast.

Joy runs two businesses dedicated to advancing healthcare in America. 

She is the CEO of Chirpy Bird, a health IT consulting company. They help physicians and groups across the nation with strategies on quality programs, HIPAA audits, and more.

She is also the founder and host of the HIT Like a Girl Podcast, the place to go for details on groundbreaking healthcare technology innovations driven by women. 

Using Various Health Data Sources

In short, Chirpy Bird keeps up with rapidly changing healthcare policy to provide customized and actionable recommendations to its partners. 

For example, the CMS completes an annual audit to judge the eligibility of a clinic for the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS). Chirpy Bird takes data to assess four categories, which include the following:

1. EHR technology use
2. Different quality measures to ensure performance is at its highest
3. Improvement activities
4. The cost of healthcare at an organization 

Joy describes how the fourth category, cost, can easily be the most complicated.

Chirpy Bird has to look at referral networks, healthcare professional training, patient relationship codes, and more to understand which costs are attributable to a practice. 

When you are evaluating a consultant, make sure that they pull in data from multiple sources to properly evaluate their recommendations for you.

Approach to Challenging Healthcare Data Problems

Joy explains it in less complex terms here:

“The way that I describe it to our clients is that all of this data is telling a story, so we need to understand what are the parts and pieces that are telling that story. Just like any big challenge, tackle it one step at a time."

Joy and her company help untangle problems within the web of data to build the best recommendations for healthcare organizations.

Check out Chirpy Bird’s website for more information: www.chirpybirdinc.com. 

Involvement in the Industry

In addition to being a CEO and a subject matter expert in incentive programs and digital health, she also has a passion for celebrating women in health technology. 

Her podcast, HIT Like a Girl, invites listeners to learn more about what women are doing in health tech. 

Joy started the podcast to lift-up women doing influential work and inspire other women to follow in their footsteps. She describes one instance where a college student changed her major from nursing to health informatics after hearing her podcast. 

She says: 

“How wonderful to be able to help guide somebody younger into something that might be more meaningful for them.” 

This is one of the positive impacts of creating a community for women in health technology.

Joy’s podcast has become a “water cooler” for women in health technology to talk about their work and connect. Through this community, these women form professional relationships and bounce ideas around to one another.

HIT Like a Girl is impacting the larger health tech community as well:

“Healthcare feels like this 30,000-piece puzzle and every one of us holds a piece of it. And how wonderful to be able to start to put the pieces together, see the bigger picture, and hopefully work towards the larger goal of improving outcomes and getting farther faster and leveraging our connections, network, knowledge, and expertise to do better.”

Check out Healthjump’s Women in Health Panel to hear more from Joy and another game-changer in the field, Nicole Bocskocsky.

Collecting and Measuring Data

Healthjump's data management platform has been built to flex with the changes your value-based care organization may be dealing with.

Contact our team of data experts to talk about the impact you can have with the way you authorize access to data.