10 Healthcare IT Innovators: InformationWeek 500
<em>InformationWeek 500</em> healthcare companies and hospitals are using technology in inventive ways to improve care. These innovations include a unique virtual reality system for burn victims, "Smart Rooms," and a customized program to track application and system performance problems. Take a quick peek at 10 of these IT initiatives in our slideshow.
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The term "innovation" has been so overused and abused because entrepreneurs and marketing executives realize that the word catches people's attention. Unfortunately, such overuse dulls our senses, making it harder to recognize the real deal.
The 10 healthcare organizations featured in our slideshow are the real deal. Centene, for instance, has developed a unique program that uses advanced analytics and algorithms to identify high-risk members in its insurance plans so they can get the medical attention they need before their conditions get out of hand -- and a lot more expensive to manage.
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital has combined Amalga, HealthVault, and a variety of other tools to give clinicians faster access to patient data from disparate hospital systems, a "cure" that reduces the likelihood of duplicate medical testing.
When Trinity Health devised its Genesis Platform, it concentrated on a tightly integrated combination of new and legacy applications, an integration that produced impressive improvements in clinical outcomes, as we outline in the slide summary. Detroit Medical Center, on the other hand, invested a good portion of its IT budget in Smart Rooms, in which data from electronic health records and bedside medical devices talk to one another in ways only dreamed of a decade ago.
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is focused on, among other things, safety. It is creating a health information exchange that includes the patient summaries needed when a hospital patient is transferred to a skilled nursing facility or home, for example. In situations like this, BIDMC produces a Continuity of Care Document with discharge instructions for patients via a multidisciplinary Web application used by doctors, nurses, social workers, and case managers.
To take a deeper dive into these genuine innovations, read on.
Go to the 2011 InformationWeek 500 homepage
As any experienced IT manager knows, health IT can contribute to improved quality of care and decision making, but it can also introduce new types of errors. With that in mind, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CIO John Halamka is focusing on ways to ensure that HIT itself is safe. His team is working with other stakeholders in Massachusetts to create a health information exchange supporting safety, quality, and efficiency. That includes the patient summaries needed when a hospital patient is transferred to a skilled nursing facility or home, for example. In situations like this, BIDMC produces a Continuity of Care Document with discharge instructions for patients via a multidisciplinary Web application used by doctors, nurses, social workers, and case managers.
BIDMC also provides patients with a CCD when they want to transfer data from their BIDMC health records to a personal health record such as HealthVault. That data includes demographics, medications, allergies, and problems. BIDMC goes a step further, however. While most commercial personal health records don't provide for exchange of clinician office notes, BIDMC is piloting the exchange of that information through its PatientSite OpenNotes Project.
Halamka sums up this innovation/safety partnership succinctly: "Safety is improved by sharing data between providers and patients, making the patient the steward of their own records. This transparency encourages a dialog about treatment plans, patient care preferences, and the accuracy of data in the medical record."
Overall InformationWeek 500 ranking: 12
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Centene recently rolled out its Centelligence platform, a management program that uses a combination of advanced analytics and algorithms to help identify its high-risk members and deliver useful data -- including automated alerts -- to call center representatives, case managers, medical management employees, and medical providers to ensure that members receive the appropriate healthcare. Using Centelligence, demographic and medical data are collected and enhanced through predictive modeling. The predictive techniques, combined with advanced analytics, enable Centene to offer appropriate case and disease management for members who are enrolled in its health plans.
With Centelligence, Centene can see if a member has picked up a prescription that was ordered by one of the clinicians, for instance, an important piece of data to help measure adherence to the treatment plan. Centene also asks all pregnant members, or their healthcare providers, to complete a "notification of pregnancy" health risk assessment, which is then scored by the Centelligence tool. That score allows the health plan to put high-risk members into a case management program, called StartSmart for Your Baby, which is designed to meet their special needs.
Overall InformationWeek 500 ranking: 22
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NewYork-Presbyterian uses Microsoft products, including Amalga and HealthVault, to help give clinicians faster access to patient information from disparate hospital systems. At the same time, they are using technology to engage patients in their care. The organization's MyNYP.org portal delivers a patient-controlled health record, while NYP mobile applications present key patient data to on-the-go providers to expedite decision-making and facilitate communication among team members. The goal is to provide data-driven, efficient care to patients from any NYP location.
Overall InformationWeek 500 ranking: 23
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Building on its KP HealthConnect e-medical records system, which contains data for 8.8 million patients, Kaiser Permanente is advancing telemedicine applications, especially around dermatology and orthopedics. KP primary-care physicians take high-resolution photos of patients' skin conditions and store them on KP computer systems for real-time patient consults with remote dermatologists, including wound care. KP is also rolling out telemedicine for orthopedic and spine consultations, and for clinical decision support. In KP's Northern California region, the organization is piloting a program using mobile video carts that allow KP patients who do not speak English or who use sign language to connect with a language translator who is on call but not on-site.
Overall InformationWeek 500 ranking: 34
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Trinity Health, the fourth-largest Catholic health care system in the U.S., has developed the Genesis platform, which includes 28 computer applications from nine vendors and touches virtually every major clinical and revenue process at the hospital. Getting the new platform up and running included the tightly choreographed integration of new systems with multiple legacy applications, including laboratory, picture archiving and communication system, and enterprise resource planning. More than 60 real-time and batch interfaces were activated during conversion.
All the work has clearly paid off: Genesis has had a measurable effect on patient care. Its rapid implementation has led to a 44% drop in severity-adjusted mortality rates, when compared with benchmark data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In practical terms, that means more than 2,600 lives are saved across the system annually. Similarly, since going live with Genesis, emergent medications are delivered 40% faster, and nurses spend 8% more of their time at the bedside.
Overall InformationWeek 500 ranking: 35
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Baylor Health Care System initially implemented a suite of applications called Eclipsys -- now part of the Allscripts line of products -- as the cornerstone of its electronic health records but eventually realized that it needed a customized system to meet its unique needs. It required a program that would accurately track application and system performance problems. The need for such a program arose because the current EHR platform had been implemented across a mix of hardwired computers, wireless laptops, and workstations on wheels. That made it difficult to determine if the performance issues were related to differences in hardware or were software-related.
To solve this problem, the Baylor team incorporated existing vendor components, including SQL Server 2008 and custom C++ .NET code, plus advanced low-level .NET capabilities. With the large amount of data produced by the integrated code, a front-end application was needed to manage and display the results. Baylor developed a front-end viewer -- the BayStats viewer -- using C++, and third-party graphing controls were added. The resulting application now provides high-level graphs that quickly drill down into areas where performance problems can be detected.
Overall InformationWeek 500 ranking: 49
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Detroit Medical Center is undergoing an unprecedented period of construction and renovation in its eight hospitals, CIO Mike LeRoy says. In March, the first of the projects was completed with the opening of an innovative Smart Unit, an adult acute-care 30-bed telemetry unit. The unit's complete physical renovation and technology innovations are intended to transform the way patient care is delivered. About a third of its $3 million-plus project budget has been invested in IT, including technology from Cerner, that's designed to integrate and innovate care processes. For instance, in patient Smart Rooms, data from e-medical records and medical devices, including vital signs and telemetry waveforms, are presented in real time at the point of care. That enables DMC staff to make better-informed clinical decisions at the moment patients most benefit.
Overall InformationWeek 500 ranking 51
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As an early adopter of e-medical records and other clinical systems, St. Joseph Health System is now on a mission of "consumerization" of its IT innovations. For instance, iPads are being rolled out to business and clinical operations. So far, 337 iPads have been distributed to help board members access a Web-based application designed to decrease the need for paper reports and facilitate dialogue and data sharing. For physicians, SJHS is piloting a variety of device options, including iPads, iPhones, and BlackBerrys, within the hospital and remotely. In one pilot, physicians using smartphones can access fetal-monitoring strips, annotations, and data to remotely monitor their pregnant patients. Meanwhile, clinical hospital staff is piloting wireless VoIP technology for hands-free communication.
Other initiatives: Webcams are used in the neonatal intensive care units to provide "virtual visits" for families and babies, and Skype is used to allow servicemen in Iraq to virtually participate in the birth of their babies in SJHS hospitals.
Overall InformationWeek 500 ranking: 55
Go to the 2011 InformationWeek 500 homepage
The Lehigh Valley Health Network Regional Burn Center was exploring an adjunct pain management approach when it came up with an innovative virtual reality system. Its challenge was to find a hardware and software combination that offered distraction and pain relief without the use of head gear or goggles that might harm patients with facial burns. Similarly, the system could not pose obstacles for patients who had hand and arm burns that would limit their movements.
A vendor was able to customize a system that allows the virtual reality display to be suspended from a photography-based articulating arm, which is customized to accept the display. Suspended from the arm, the display has minimal contact with the patient, yet provides near full immersion into the virtual environment. The patient enters a VR world that provides a fun-filled snow-like environment in which he or she is able to throw snowballs at animals and characters, while moving around the cool ,snowy world.
Overall InformationWeek 500 ranking: 56
Go to the 2011 InformationWeek 500 homepage
Premier healthcare alliance's PhysicianFocus, part of its QualityConnect performance improvement program, provides physicians and hospital administrators with quality and safety data drawn from multiple sources. The program helps improve clinical performance and supports professional practice evaluation efforts by pinpointing variances, evaluating processes, and supporting Ongoing Professional Practice Evaluation, the Joint Commission program that measures a practitioner's clinical and behavioral competence. PhysicianFocus provides clinical outcome metrics that can help identify variations in clinical care and monitor ongoing quality, efficacy, and the impact of improvement efforts.
With this tool in place, healthcare providers can drill down to patient-level data to help reduce mortality, complications -- including infections -- and readmissions, and reduce patients' length of stay. The program also provides hospital administrators with online, interactive, and printable views of the data needed to measure productivity, cost savings, revenue, and customer satisfaction.
Overall InformationWeek 500 ranking: 59
Go to the 2011 InformationWeek 500 homepage
Premier healthcare alliance's PhysicianFocus, part of its QualityConnect performance improvement program, provides physicians and hospital administrators with quality and safety data drawn from multiple sources. The program helps improve clinical performance and supports professional practice evaluation efforts by pinpointing variances, evaluating processes, and supporting Ongoing Professional Practice Evaluation, the Joint Commission program that measures a practitioner's clinical and behavioral competence. PhysicianFocus provides clinical outcome metrics that can help identify variations in clinical care and monitor ongoing quality, efficacy, and the impact of improvement efforts.
With this tool in place, healthcare providers can drill down to patient-level data to help reduce mortality, complications -- including infections -- and readmissions, and reduce patients' length of stay. The program also provides hospital administrators with online, interactive, and printable views of the data needed to measure productivity, cost savings, revenue, and customer satisfaction.
Overall InformationWeek 500 ranking: 59
Go to the 2011 InformationWeek 500 homepage
The term "innovation" has been so overused and abused because entrepreneurs and marketing executives realize that the word catches people's attention. Unfortunately, such overuse dulls our senses, making it harder to recognize the real deal.
The 10 healthcare organizations featured in our slideshow are the real deal. Centene, for instance, has developed a unique program that uses advanced analytics and algorithms to identify high-risk members in its insurance plans so they can get the medical attention they need before their conditions get out of hand -- and a lot more expensive to manage.
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital has combined Amalga, HealthVault, and a variety of other tools to give clinicians faster access to patient data from disparate hospital systems, a "cure" that reduces the likelihood of duplicate medical testing.
When Trinity Health devised its Genesis Platform, it concentrated on a tightly integrated combination of new and legacy applications, an integration that produced impressive improvements in clinical outcomes, as we outline in the slide summary. Detroit Medical Center, on the other hand, invested a good portion of its IT budget in Smart Rooms, in which data from electronic health records and bedside medical devices talk to one another in ways only dreamed of a decade ago.
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is focused on, among other things, safety. It is creating a health information exchange that includes the patient summaries needed when a hospital patient is transferred to a skilled nursing facility or home, for example. In situations like this, BIDMC produces a Continuity of Care Document with discharge instructions for patients via a multidisciplinary Web application used by doctors, nurses, social workers, and case managers.
To take a deeper dive into these genuine innovations, read on.
Go to the 2011 InformationWeek 500 homepage
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