Many CMS quality and value-based care programs don't require organizations to review every patient record manually. Instead, they require identifying and reporting on the subset of patients who meet specific clinical criteria.
That's where high-quality digital clinical data becomes valuable.
Because structured digital data captures discrete clinical facts—such as laboratory values, diagnoses, medications, and encounters—it can be queried across an entire patient population in seconds. Organizations can quickly identify patients who qualify for a CMS measure and generate reports without manually reviewing thousands of charts.
This is particularly important for programs like the CMS ACCESS (Advancing Chronic Care with Effective, Scalable Solutions) Model, which rewards organizations for improving measurable outcomes for patients with common chronic conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, chronic musculoskeletal pain, and depression. Success depends on identifying eligible patients and tracking outcome measures, such as blood pressure control or other condition-specific clinical improvements, over time.
While complete medical records remain important for complex clinical decisions, they aren't always necessary for population-level monitoring. Rich digital data, especially when it includes complete laboratory values and other structured clinical observations, provides a scalable way to identify eligible patients, monitor performance, and support CMS reporting across large populations.
For organizations participating in value-based care, the combination of comprehensive digital data and targeted record retrieval creates the best of both worlds: rapid population-wide reporting today, with complete records available whenever deeper clinical review is needed.
