Lucas Moss is Director of Product Management on the Verana Health Provider Analytics team.
What do you do at Verana Health?
I’m the Director of Product Management for Provider Analytics, where I oversee activities related to quality reporting. I also manage a team of data scientists who are dedicated to MIPS (Merit-based Incentive Payment System) reporting. MIPS is part of the quality payment incentive program implemented by CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) that ties payments to quality and cost-efficient care.
The provider analytics data science team develops the quality measure algorithms that calculate performance metrics for clinical practices. We are also responsible for the development of the Quality Measure Dashboard, which is the end-user interface that practices and providers see. Practices and providers are able to view their metrics and submit their performance rates to CMS each year.
Quality reporting is the main emphasis of Provider Analytics — helping providers understand their individual and practice quality measure data, visualize their performance on these metrics, and better understand their data compared to registry averages and trends. Quality measures are designed to help providers improve their care. If providers are not performing highly on a particular measure, they are able to identify areas for potential improvement in clinical or documentation practices. This work at Verana can really have an impact by helping providers change behaviors that can ultimately lead to better patient outcomes and higher quality of care.
Tell us about your background. How did you get interested in this work?
After I graduated with my MBA, I spent the first six years out of grad school as a fundraiser in college athletics for the University of Tennessee (UT) Knoxville Athletic Department. I was a major gift officer for several years and then I moved to a position where I oversaw the annual fund. When you’re trying to efficiently run a large annual fund made up of tens of thousands of members — whether it’s football season ticket renewals or raising donations — it’s important to identify the people who are most engaged. It’s sort of a ready-made analytics problem to make sure you are running your efforts as efficiently as possible.
While I was working as a fundraiser, I went back and got my master’s in business analytics part-time. Shortly after, I had the opportunity to leave athletics and move into a full-time analytics role with the University of Tennessee Foundation, where I was responsible for all analytics, predictive giving models, and engagement models designed to increase fundraising efforts and alumni participation across the entire UT System. After leaving UT, I worked as a data scientist at PYA Analytics, where we applied analytics to complex problems in healthcare, which eventually transitioned into my role at Verana.
What should someone who is thinking about joining Verana know?
One of most exciting things about Verana is that we’re trying to accomplish and build capabilities to a scale and complexity that have not been done before. If you like to build things, work in areas where there’s uncharted territory, and figure out ways to solve complex problems that may not have ready-made solutions — then Verana would be a good fit for you.
How has it been working with your team remotely during the pandemic?
It’s gone really well. In discussions between me and my team members, it seems like everyone has a good setup at home and we’ve all gotten into a good rhythm and schedule in these circumstances. Communication is great. Between Slack, Zoom, and emails, I feel like we communicate very well throughout the day.
Share a fun fact about you!
When I was in high school, I was part of a broadcasting team that developed weekly news shows for the school, as well as a monthly show that covered more in-depth feature stories. During my junior year, we did a piece on the positive impact of a local community center in town for one of our monthly shows. I did some of the camera work in the field, as well as served as one of the two news anchors for the studio portion of the story, and it won the national award for the best high school news program in the country. My broadcasting teacher liked to joke that I missed my true calling.
Interested in learning about opportunities to join the Verana team? View a list of open opportunities here.