A West Des Moines-based company is building a giant national health-care research database that will allow researchers to extract large quantities of information from myriad sources faster and more efficiently.

The Iowa Foundation for Medical Care, a medical information management company with satellite offices in Illinois, Maryland, Nevada and Virginia, received the $3.3 million contract to build the database as part of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act. Subsequent phases of the project may bring additional federal money to the Iowa company.

Mike Rozendaal, the IFMC’s assistant vice president, said the company’s experience with health data management helped it win the contract with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, one of several federal contracts the company has received. “Our company has a unique understanding of working with extremely large data warehouses and expertise in CMS data sets through our many years as a contractor with the agency,” he said.

The data warehouse will include information from multiple CMS health databases, state Medicaid claims and CMS beneficiary summaries submitted from 1999 to the present. Hospitals, long-term-care facilities and home health-care agencies already submit information as part of the CMS’s quality-improvement public reporting initiatives, and physicians’ offices will begin reporting to CMS within the next year, Rozendaal said.

When the system goes online in December, the database will contain an estimated four to eight terabytes, or four to eight trillion bytes, of data blended from the data sources to show the continuum of care received by individuals in all health-care settings. Patients will be categorized according to the type of chronic medical conditions they suffer.

The database will be welcomed by researchers compiling information for community-care initiatives, Rozendaal predicted. “There’s such a large amount of data today that it’s cumbersome to get,” he said. “This allows them to get it faster, and it’s organized more logically.”

A researcher looking into care initiatives for a specific type of diabetes, for example, would be able to extract information relating to everything from the disease’s incidence rate to the type of services provided. From that information, researchers will be able to pinpoint trends among chronically ill patients that may range from overutilization of care to underutiliziation of care, in the end arriving at conclusions that may improve patients’ access to care.

The goal of the project, Rozendaal said, is to improve care for the chronically ill as well as maximize the effectiveness of public dollars being spent for that care. “To tie payments to quality, we have to have the data,” he said.

In the past, researchers requested that information from the CMS itself and would sometimes wait up to three months for their requests to be processed because of multiple requests for the information. “The CMS has priorities in its system, and some research requests are more complicated than others,” Rozendaal said. “Everybody’s asking for information, and researchers are not at the top of that priority list. It’s really taxed the system.”

The IFMC, a non-profit company, has 750 employees in its various locations, and the contract to build the health database created 16 new positions at a median salary of $70,000. About 350 people are employed at its West Des Moines headquarters, and about 85 percent of them work on various Medicare projects. Rozendaal said the IFMC is “uniquely qualified” to handle Medicare contracts. “We know how to build big systems, and we also understand their data,” he said. “We are a government contractor with a very big emphasis on health-quality improvement.”

The company’s employees bring a range of skills to the project and include not only high-end computer programmers, but also business analysts, health informatics professionals, database and warehouse administrators, systems analysts and project managers. “They’re all high-end jobs,” Rozendaal said.

The IFMC has more than 30 years of experience in forming collaborative relationships to improve health-care quality, health education and health information management.