Co-Winner: PointClickCare
Improving the Care of Patient Populations
The healthcare industry and our company faced many challenges over the past few years; while it is undeniable that COVID-19 elevated visibility of facility struggles with infection control, these difficulties persisted long before the pandemic revealed their existence. During the pandemic, our number one priority was connecting with customers to understand their pain points and offer services to best support them. It is clear that digitizing the health record has become even more essential to more easily understand what is going on in healthcare organizations, protect providers by enabling remote visits, and improve data sharing during patient transitions. Many customers realized that without using our technology, they were not able to safely manage resident/patient care or leverage telemedicine effectively (to keep doctors safe).
In April of 2020, we launched our Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) solution to help Infection Preventionists and care teams perform ongoing resident surveillance, allowing identification and reporting of infections in real time in one centralized location. This helped to effectively understand and bring awareness to infections, as care teams need an efficient way to review and access centralized case information and facilitate transparency in reporting of infection information across their facilities and communities. The capabilities of IPC include: access to a central repository of infection cases to improve patient care management; automatic input of information documented in PointClickCare to replace the manual efforts required to compile infection case information; documentation of resident condition using industry accepted standards to correlate the symptoms of infections and ensure a consistent approach in all residents; interactive dashboards that display real-time infection case information; and the ability for Infection Preventionists to develop evidence-based recommendations based on infection analysis for clinical and nonclinical team members. A product with this breadth of functionality would usually take quarters or even years to develop, but because we were laser focused on what we needed to do, our release timeline was reduced to a few weeks. Using IPC, customers have improved how they identify and track respiratory infections and potential COVID-19 symptoms in residents quicker. Receiving an early warning helped staff move quickly ahead of potential cases and limit the spread of coronavirus across their communities.
In April of 2020 we also launched another innovative tool for the industry called PULSE COVID. PULSE COVID was a lightweight, easily implementable version of PULSE Enterprise that was offered at no cost to state and local response organizations during the early days of the pandemic. The Patient Search feature within PULSE Enterprise is a secure web-based portal that allows authorized clinical providers operating in non-routine settings (e.g., shelters and alternate care sites) access to national health information networks that contain clinical and medication history documents of millions of Americans. It is intended for use during state or federally declared disasters and public health emergencies and enables more informed, higher quality health care services for individuals who seek treatment in sites that are not usually equipped with an EMR or connected to health information infrastructure. The Missing Persons feature within PULSE Enterprise additionally allows health care providers who have been separated from their patients and family reunification specialists seeking to find lost individuals a mechanism to search participating hospitals, emergency departments, and disaster shelters to determine if the person has had a recent encounter in that facility. PULSE COVID was used by partner states to augment care in COVID antibody treatment sites during the pandemic. The full-featured PULSE Enterprise has additionally been used to support several wildfires and hurricane responses that ran concurrently to the COVID-19 pandemic. Most recently, PULSE Enterprise was activated in Florida for Hurricanes Ian and Nicole and in Oregon during the 2021 wildfire season. Prior to that, PULSE Enterprise was used in Louisiana during Hurricane Ida and in California during several wildfire seasons. Nora Belcher, executive director of the Texas e-Health Alliance, has described PULSE as “A game-changer for how we access disparate and siloed health information networks at the local, state, and national levels.
Co-Winner: Accumen
MyBloodHealth® - Leveraging Technologyto Revolutionize Anemia Management
At least one third of patients in your hospital or health system have this common and modifiable condition that negatively affects their quality of life and work productivity. Can you guess what it is? The answer may surprise you; it is anemia. Despite how common it is, it is not normal. And, unfortunately, too many patients with undiagnosed anemia undergo elective surgery, and wind-up receiving blood transfusions. These transfusions are not only preventable, but they are also increasing patients’ chances of morbidity and mortality, contributing to higher healthcare costs, increasing length of stay, and resulting in future hospital readmissions that are non-reimbursable. So, how do we bridge the gap between screening for anemia and ensuring all patients receive the care they deserve? That is where MyBloodHealth® comes in. This patented system-wide anemia management platform helps hospitals and health systems, like yours, manage anemia in a simple, efficient, and cost-effective manner. Hospitals no longer need to rely on manual processes and multiple data sources to meet the needs of their patients. Even with the current workforce shortage, your staff can do more with less and not worry about sacrificing patient care. Plus, MyBloodHealth integrates with any EHR, eliminating the need for manual processes. Additionally, MyBloodHealth systemizes patient workflows, triages patients for you and creates custom care plans, enabling your health system to manage up to 50 anemic patients per day with virtually the same resources. Even a highly efficient clinician can only manage about eight anemic patients per day due to the manual process that includes multiple checkpoints, handoffs, data risks, and headaches.
Recently, a three-hospital health system in the Midwest, with 3,300 providers and 34,000 employees across 70 locations, transfused 17% of its patients, using 2.2 red cell units per patient. After launching MyBloodHealth, this health system avoided 833 transfusion exposures over an 18-month period, reducing their usage to 1.4 red cell units per patient and transfused only 1.6% of anemic patients. Similarly, another large health system with 18-hospitals serving the Philadelphia, PA region, Jefferson Health, implemented MyBloodHealth and anticipated saving $2.6M over three years in blood acquisition costs, and creating $8.3M in additional revenue and savings. After one year of implementation, they have avoided 269 potential complications, reallocated 15,000 nursing hours, and already improved their margin by +$5.8M.
More than 80 plus clients have benefited from infusion revenue, lower blood acquisition costs, and shorter hospital stays. Isn’t it time you set your anemia management program in the right direction? MyBloodHealth is powered by Accumen. Accumen helps hospitals and health systems respond to complex challenges and even thrive in today’s unpredictable and ever-changing environment. With a focus on lab operations, clinical transformation, and 3D imaging post-processing, Accumen leverages technology enabled consulting services to solve complex hospital and health system issues. Based in Scottsdale, AZ, with offices in Louisville, KY, and Blue Bell, PA, Accumen accelerates results for more than 1,000 US hospitals and health systems by providing expert resources, extensive operational and clinical data, as well as analytic technology.
Runner-Up: Nuance
Enhancing the patient-physician relationship
With a growing physician shortage, increasing burnout, and declining patient satisfaction, a dramatic change is needed to make healthcare more efficient and effective, and bring back the joy of practicing medicine. AI-driven ambient clinical intelligence (ACI) promises to help by revolutionizing patient and provider experiences with clinical documentation that writes itself.
What is ambient clinical intelligence? For decades, researchers have been working toward a vision of ambient intelligence, finding ways to harness cloud, advanced AI, and the Internet of Things to create more intelligent spaces that help people live and work more safely, efficiently, and sustainably. Perhaps the most important application of ambient intelligence is in healthcare, where AI-driven ambient clinical intelligence is transforming experiences for providers and their patients.
Ambient clinical intelligence (ACI) uses advanced, voice enabled AI to automatically document patient encounters during a natural, free-flowing conversation between the physician, patients, and their families. It enables physicians to give the patient their full attention during the visit while ACI technology creates complete, accurate clinical notes directly in the EHR for the clinician to review and sign. With ACI, clinical documentation is created automatically at the point of care helping to solve many of the most pressing challenges in healthcare.
Clinician burnout is a major problem for healthcare organizations and patients. In Medscape’s 2021 physician survey, 42% of physicians reported feeling burned out, citing “too many bureaucratic tasks” and “spending too many hours at work” as the main causes. Providers often spend hours of their day documenting patient care—and the administrative burden often stretches into their own time, preventing them from switching off after a long day and spending time with their families.
When almost half of physicians are experiencing burnout, we’re unlikely to see much movement on the shortage of physicians, with the Association of American Medical Colleges projecting a shortfall of nearly 122,000 physicians in the US by 2032. And of course, as the physician shortage increases, so does the pressure on those who remain, exacerbating the burnout problem. All of this has a direct impact on the patient experience, as stressed, overworked clinicians can often be (or appear to be) rushed and distracted. That can lead to errors with potentially catastrophic consequences, but it also erodes the relationship of trust between physicians and patients who feel they’re not being listened to or treated as individuals. Once the patient physician relationship begins to break down, disillusioned patients are less likely to engage with their care, adhere to care plans, and follow preventive healthcare advice—increasing the likelihood of adverse outcomes.
However, by using ACI solutions to remove much of the documentation burden, healthcare organizations can reduce burnout, retain existing staff, and attract new talent, while improving patient relationships and outcomes.
But perhaps most importantly, ACI can free physicians from the shackles of clerical duties and bring back the joy of practicing medicine.
Nobody went to medical school so they could spend their days entering data into an EHR. They went to medical school to embark on a rewarding career, helping people improve their health and their lives.
ACI technology ensures the primary focus of each visit is the patient and their story, not notetaking or documentation. That strengthens the patient-physician relationship and increases patient satisfaction, engagement, and retention. It brings providers back to what attracted them to medicine in the first place. And it removes the heart-sinking feeling of getting to the end of clinic time and seeing hours of documentation tasks ahead.
For example, since implementing Nuance’s ACI solution, the Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX), University of Michigan Health-West has seen patient satisfaction rates rise to 98%,
with most saying their visits have felt more personal and that their physician has been more focused on them. Physicians spend less time looking at computer screens, documenting care, and working after hours. With Nuance DAX, they can focus on delivering higher-quality care to more patients—without burning out.
The most exciting thing about ambient clinical intelligence is that improving patient-physician encounters is just the beginning. The potential applications for ACI are almost limitless, but one thing is certain: this technology will change the experience of care for physicians and patients, and help both groups lead happier, healthier lives.
