Precision and Partnership:
How Cityblock Uses Ursa to Drive Focused Improvement in Value-Based Care
Overview
Cityblock Health, a value-based care organization focused on improving outcomes for complex, underserved populations, is redefining what quality means in valuebased care. Rather than settling for standard reporting or box-checking compliance, the organization sought to build a smarter, more adaptive quality engine that could power new innovations, unify data across sources, and help care teams focus on real improvement where it matters most.
According to Dr. Michael Tang, Vice President of Integrated Care at Cityblock, “Our goal was to go beyond compliance and truly change how quality work gets done. With Ursa, we can empower our care teams with the right data at the right times, allowing them to focus their efforts where they can create real impact for our members.”
Cityblock partnered with Ursa Health to build a more dynamic, multi-source analytics environment that was capable of seamlessly combining claims, EHR, clinical data feeds, and payor gaps-in-care reports. The result is a high-fidelity, real-time foundation that empowers Cityblock’s teams to zero in on open quality gaps and direct their attention where it matters most.
The Challenge: Getting the Measures Right to Power Innovation
For Cityblock, an organization that values thinking big, acting boldly, and adding value, advancing quality meant more than meeting benchmarks — it meant building the precision needed to innovate with confidence. Managing over one hundred thousand members across Medicare and Medicaid populations requires a strong measurement foundation, one capable of handling unique attribution rules, lookback periods, and data variations without losing accuracy or context. With Ursa’s robust library of certified quality measures, including HEDIS, PQA, and Medicare Stars, Cityblock gained the rigor and consistency needed to measure performance confidently across every program.
Additionally, within such a complex environment, Cityblock’s teams required the ability to not only view quality measure results, but also to fully understand how those results were built. They needed to integrate payorspecific data, interrogate logic, and adjust parameters in real time, ensuring every measure reflected their evolving goals. By getting the measures right, Cityblock could focus on what it does best: creating new, more effective ways to build people-centered care for its members.
The Partnership: Building a Flexible, Transparent Platform
Ursa’s modular platform provided the flexible architecture Cityblock needed. Through direct integrations with their EHR, clinical data feeds, and claims data, Ursa harmonized multiple sources into a single, auditable environment.
Beyond the technology itself, transparency and collaboration became the foundation of the partnership. The ability to review each measure line by line and understand exactly how results were derived proved essential to building trust. That trust grew even stronger through Ursa’s hands-on approach, as the implementation team partnered closely with Cityblock’s quality and technical teams to align definitions, validate results, and demonstrate precision through clear documentation of sources.
Ursa’s infrastructure also gave Cityblock the flexibility to:
- • Prioritize and customize data sources to align with clinical priorities
- • Include or exclude specific feeds from denominator logic at will
- • Quickly update configurations as new payors or contracts were added
- • Compare Ursa-calculated results side-by-side with payor-provided measures to validate accuracy
- • Leverage Ursa’s data foundation for future AI enhancements and innovation
Results and Impact
Since implementing Ursa, Cityblock has achieved:
- • Streamlined integration of multiple payors and populations, accelerating time to insight across Medicare and Medicaid programs.
- • Improved accuracy and confidence across analytics and quality teams through transparent validation.
- • Faster identification of high-priority care gaps through real-time data ingestion and flexible measure logic.
- • Reduced wasted effort by focusing outreach only on patients with truly open gaps.
- • Accelerated actionability by leveraging clinical data feeds to surface targeted care gaps for new patients immediately upon receiving rosters, rather than waiting for claims cycles to close.
- • Full flexibility to continuously innovate to support new models of care and expanding populations.
Conclusion: Transparent Partnership, Measurable Progress
For Cityblock, Ursa has become a true partner in progress. Together, they’ve built an analytics foundation that supports value-based care today while paving the way for the next evolution of quality. With a platform designed for transparency, flexibility, and sustained progress, Cityblock’s teams can focus their energy on what matters most: personalizing the service and care for each patient, closing meaningful gaps, and driving measurable improvement through ongoing innovation in value-based care.
As Dr. Michael Tang explains: “Our partnership with Ursa gives us the foundation and flexibility to keep innovating. We’re ready to advance the way we define and measure quality, explore new ways to evaluate impact, and continue raising the bar for what quality looks like in value-based care.”
Together, Cityblock and Ursa are charting a new path for quality performance — one built on precision, collaboration, and the shared pursuit of better outcomes for every member served.
Read additional success stories from some of our other clients:
- Atlas Oncology Partners – we built precise scenario models and payor-specific logic to power full-risk, value-based oncology contracting with confidence.
- IntoValue – we created a shared, demo-ready analytics environment to support direct contracting between health systems and self-insured employers.
- Matter Health – we unified claims, EHR, quality, and risk-adjustment data to drive high-touch care and performance gains for seniors in affordable housing.
- HarmonyCares – we maintained analytics integrity through a complex EMR migration while sustaining top-tier ACO performance across MSSP and ACO REACH.
- Altitude – we paired Ursa's data foundation with clinician activation tools to turn analytics into personalized, within-workflow actions that drive behavior change.