Maryland Industrial Partnerships brief

Using artificial intelligence to reduce monitoring and knowledge diffusion costs for Medicare Advantage Plans: A Feasibility Study

Optimal Solutions Group, LLC (Optimal), was awarded a grant through the Maryland Industrial Partnerships (MIPS) program to develop a health care research and delivery virtual collaborative system to provide researchers, practitioners, and professionals with a platform to share information, best practices, research, publications, and studies. The MIPS program is a branch of the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute (MTECH), which is run through the University of Maryland. The program aims to “accelerate the commercialization of technology in Maryland by jointly funding collaborative R&D projects between companies and University System of Maryland faculty.”

To complete this task, Optimal developed a system titled Quality Improvement, Innovation, and Dissemination (QI2D). The QI2D is a third-generation (3G) healthcare research and delivery collaborative system that provides a unique platform to provide access and information in one centralized place. It is used to facilitate multidimensional communications and evaluate exchanges on the QI2D using a diffusion of innovation model informing how, why, and at what rate practices or quality improvement innovations spread through practitioner, research, and policymaker populations. The program was executed in two phases: Phase I sought to customize the open-source HUBzero collaboration platform to create the QI2D and recruit key stakeholders and participants for a pilot study. This study was designed to stimulate and monitor real-world usage and guided enhancements and/or marketing approaches for Phase II. The second phase incorporated augmentations to Optimal’s previous collaborative system and included a second pilot study, web-based surveys, and focus groups at the annual Improvement Science Summit to analyze challenges and areas of improvement.