Healthcare Market Success: Cave Consulting Group (CCGroup) Affirms Continued Downloads of Free CaveGrouper-Lite™

SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--CCGroup announced in April 2012 the release of a free download version of the Cave Grouper™ software known as CaveGrouper-Lite™. This is the first public grouper of medical condition episodes-of-care. CaveGrouper-Lite™ builds longitudinal episodes of care for acute conditions (e.g., upper respiratory infections, sinusitis) and for chronic conditions (e.g., diabetes, asthma).

“The CaveGrouper-Lite™ is essential for consistent episode-of-care analytics and performance measurement”

The Cave Grouper™ is the oldest and most established grouper of episodes-of-care in the market today. The first article was published in 1992 based on work formed since 1989. Over the past 22 years, derivations of the Cave Grouper™ have been applied and validated using a wide variety of study populations totaling over 90 million individuals and 705,000 physicians. CCGroup has invested significant time and effort to determine and develop the most appropriate methods to build episodes-of-care and to obtain reliable, stable provider efficiency scores, especially the method on using a predefined set of medical conditions for a specialty type.

“CCGroup is proud to be the first company to release a free grouper of medical condition episodes to the public,” stated Dr. Douglas G. Cave, President of CCGroup. “This is a key phase to allow all of CCGroup’s methods and algorithms to be 100% transparent for public use – including health plans, health systems, and the Federal and State governments.”

CaveGrouper-Lite™ has been successfully downloaded a significant number of times – and the downloads continue. Dr. John Rootenberg, SVP of Clinical Strategy, affirmed the following percentage breakdown by entity type. “20% of downloads were from health plans; 16% from healthcare consulting firms; 15% from physician groups; 14% from hospital-based health systems; 14% from academic universities and research organizations; 9% from healthcare software vendors; 4% for State and Federal Government agencies (such as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services); 4% from pharmaceutical/biotech companies; 2% from potential competitors to CCGroup; and 2% from all other.”

A main reason stated for downloading CaveGrouper-Lite™ continues to be the new Accountable Care Organization (ACO) and Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) legislation. “The CaveGrouper-Lite™ is essential for consistent episode-of-care analytics and performance measurement,” stated Dr. Cave. “For resource planning purposes, clinical leaders need to gain a complete view of the medical condition prevalence of their covered population base. In this manner, healthcare resource needs may be adjusted with changes in the condition-specific prevalence rates.”

Other common reasons stated for downloading CaveGrouper-Lite™ included the following. Clinical leaders stated they need to track medical condition episodes-of-care to physicians and compare their average costs and utilization patterns to one another and to CCGroup’s national comparative database. Also, under the CMS Bundled Payments initiative, the episodes-of-care may be used by clinical leaders to examine possible bundled payment models.

Dr. Cave stated, “A key foundation for accountable performance measurement is the CaveGrouper-Lite™ because the methods and algorithms are 100% transparent, free to the public, and tested and validated on all study populations.”

Download the CaveGrouper-Lite™

About Cave Consulting Group, Inc.

Cave Consulting Group, Inc. is a software and consulting firm located in San Mateo, California. The company is focused on improving the efficiency (cost-of-care) and effectiveness (quality-of-care) in the healthcare delivery system. Senior management of CCGroup has assessed the performance of physicians and hospitals for over 23 years for health plans, HMOs, TPAs, employers, and the Federal Government.