PRESS RELEASE
Contact Altruista Health: Contact, UC San Diego
Danielle Maggio Kim Edwards
dmaggio@altruistahealth.com kedwards@ucsd.edu
703-707-8890 x103 619-543-6163
Altruista Health Secures License for CPDS from University of California, San Diego
Reston, VA – September 4, 2008 – Altruista Health announced today that it signed an agreement with the UC San Diego to license the use of the Chronic Illness and Disability Payment System (CDPS), a diagnostic classification system for Medicaid populations. Altruista Health’s GuidingCareTM will be the only commercially available care management technology on the market to bundle and resell the system within its flagship product.
CDPS was developed by Richard Kronick, Ph.D., professor, Department of Family and Preventive Medicine and his colleagues at UC San Diego in the mid-1990s. They wanted to create a tool that state Medicaid programs could use when contracting with managed care organizations (MCOs) for people with disabilities. In the absence of ‘risk-adjusted payments,’ MCOs are faced with strong incentives to avoid signing up enrollees who are more likely to need higher than average levels of healthcare.
“Risk-adjusted payment systems dampen the incentives that health plans face to ‘cherry-pick’ or ‘lemon drop,’” said Dr. Kronick. “The strong relationship between diagnoses, health care utilization and expenditures also CDPS to be used to identify people who are likely to require more health care services.”
“We are very pleased to have secured this partnership with UC San Diego for the use of CDPS in our commercial care management technology,” said Ashish Kachru, President. Mr. Kachru added, “We hope that MCOs will see the great value of CDPS as it has been incorporated into our predictive modeling engine to help target patients that are in greatest need of disease management services. We believe that CDPS performs very well for Medicaid populations due to its precise identification and categorization of a number of medium and high-cost diagnosis”, said Mr. Kachru.
About Altruista Health, Inc.
Altruista Health, Inc. provides highly patient-centric and customizable total population disease management technology and solutions to commercial and government health payers, hospitals, clinics and employers in order to streamline clinical and administrative processes, improve patient outcomes and reduce avoidable healthcare costs.
About University of California, San Diego
Founded in 1968, UC San Diego School of Medicine is celebrating its 40th anniversary. The class size has grown from 44 to 134 students, graduating over 3,700 M.D.s. In 2008, U.S. News and World Report ranked UC San Diego School of Medicine 14th in the nation among research medical schools and fifth among public medical schools.
Dr. Kronick is a professor of Family and Preventive Medicine and adjunct professor of Political Science and a nationally recognized specialist in healthcare policy. He served as a Senior Health Care Policy Advisor in the Clinton Administration, where he contributed to the development of President Clinton's proposal for health care reform. He also served as Director of Policy and Reimbursement in the Massachusetts Department of Public Welfare and the Assistant Director in the Massachusetts Office of Health Policy.