As PeraHealth team members manned our HIMSS18 booth to demonstrate the gold-standard Rothman Index, attended education sessions, and mingled with more than 40,000 other attendees at the HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition in Las Vegas, last week (March 5-9, 2018), we enjoyed being part of the conversation on current and emerging healthcare technology trends, including:
1. Patients records need to show the continuum of care, not just the hospital stay.
In the session, “Beyond the EHR: Continuous Innovation for the Transition to Value-Based Care,” with Providence St. Joseph Health, Himformatics, and InterSystems, the speakers emphasize you need more than an EHR to support value-based care in today’s healthcare environment. In fact, they say you need a Connected Health Record (CHR) to tell the full patient story and encompass the continuum of care across providers and conditions, and to complement the EHR. You also must have a CHR product manager to effectively manage adoption and innovation, considering the population health needs for the service area.
2. Technology should help capture a continuous “voice of the customer” feedback loop from internal and external customers.
Whether this idea means building applications for internal health system staff to use or creating patient experience programs, getting input from target audiences fuels success. In the session, “Chief Experience Officer: The New Leader Driving Innovation to Transform Healthcare for Patients, Families, and Care Teams,” the University of Chicago Medical Center recommends gathering patient input more frequently, including how they feel, what they think, and what they say could be done better…at multiple stages before, during, and after healthcare encounters.
And, regarding staff as customers, in the session, “Visualizing the Patient Experience Using an Agile Framework,” UVA Medical Center recommends that leaders speak to end users of IT solutions more often to understand the data flow and continuously improve processes for gathering and displaying information on experience and satisfaction.
3. Organizations should build regular communication and education into daily clinical and operational workflows.
Educating stakeholders is critical for adoption of new and different initiatives, and strategies like huddles increase chances of successful adoption. In the session, “Improving Throughput and Decreasing LOS,” NYU Langone and LeHigh Valley Health Network detail a daily leadership huddle that uses embedded EHR analytics and real-time dashboard reports for staff to speak from. PeraHealth’s services support this strategy through, “Enhanced Communication: Leveraging a Common Clinical Language.” Care providers are improving communication by incorporating patients’ Rothman Index scores and trends into care coordination rounds, shift changes, and other transitions of care.
4. Healthcare data is moving to the cloud
The HIMSS18 Cloud Symposium, sponsored by Amazon, spent time debunking cloud myths of low usage rates and high security risks. In the session, “Cloud Usage in Healthcare,” HIMSS Media says by 2020 a corporate “no cloud” policy will be as rare as a “no-internet” policy is today. HIMSS Media also says the cloud actually mitigates security risks.
Hospitals are also using the cloud to integrate data from outside their current EHRs for a better picture of patient history. The cloud is an easier method than previous multi-step, multi-technology ways to do that. For example, hospitals can use the cloud to pull data from their old EHR on past patient visits and integrate it with more current data in the new EHR.
5. Organizations are increasingly using patient scoring algorithms for monitoring and predicting patient acuity.
The influx of sessions on patient scores, early warning systems, and homegrown patient acuity/deterioration solutions shows PeraHealth’s foresight and pioneering innovation in this area. For 10 years, PeraHealth has validated its Rothman Index with peer-reviewed research. The Rothman Index provides clinicians with a visual dashboard of the patient’s condition in real-time; helping them detect subtle, potentially life-threatening changes enabling earlier clinical intervention. PeraTrend, powered by the Rothman Index, integrates into the EHR. The RI automatically extracts hundreds of data points, including nursing assessments, from the EHR and converts them into a visual representation of patient condition, trended over time. Every time one of those data points changes, the algorithm adjusts the patient’s score and updates the longitudinal view of the patient’s condition over time.
PeraHealth invites you to learn more about the Rothman Index on the webinar, “The Evolution of the Rothman Index: Report Out on Results of Top Clinical Deterioration Algorithm,” March 22, 2018, at 2 p.m. ET. Register.
To conclude, we thank HIMSS for an excellent conference and point you to additional conference summaries from HIMSS staff:
- Tweets from attendees, “stories of success, surrender and solidarity” – Lost and Found at #HIMSS18, from Adam Bazer, senior manager, health information systems, HIMSS North America
- THAT’S A WRAP! HIMSS18 MEDIA MENTIONS