Jessica Davis

Nearly two years after implementing workforce analytics, Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital has saved more than $10 million on costs by addressing staff issues and increasing employee engagement.

The document outlines eight guidelines for achieving precision medicine principles, including a ‘participant-first’ system.

Much the way consumer analytics fundamentally improved how products and services are sold, healthcare analytics will one day change the way providers deliver care. But Sriram Vishwanath contends that a lot has to happen before that day comes.

Part of the Helping Hospitals Improve patient Care Act, the amendment also exempts ambulatory surgical centers from MIPS through 2017 and 2018.

The public platform, DTSec, contains a set of security performance requirements to prevent cyberattacks and data breaches.

Iowa- and Illinois-based Genesis Health Systems has joined forces with visibility and analytics provider, STANLEY Healthcare, and nurse call platform provider, Critical Alert, to streamline clinical workflows using STANLEY'S RTLS platform and Critical Alert's Nurse Call tool, the companies announced last week.   Using the native integration from Critical Alert and the staff workflow function of STANLEY's RTLS platform, the staff at Genesis can locate clinicians and respond to bedside patient alerts and requests. Maureen Nylin, nursing clinical informatics specialist at Genesis Health System told Healthcare IT News that Genesis expects the implementation will improve HCAHPS scores and staff and patient satisfaction.   "The implementation was a collaborative approach," Nylin said. "Alarm management is a hot button issue from everyone across the board; it's getting tongue-in-cheek. It's not about managing alarms, but making sure what you're doing is meaningful."   "For our clinicians, when they're getting messages, they know exactly what the patient needs," she added. "Trying to overcome alarm fatigue is about getting the right message to the right person, at the right time."   Implementation began in June of 2015 at Genesis' DeWitt Community Hospital. According to Nylin, one of the greatest improvements is that patient calls are canceled as the nurse walks into a room, which frees up time for the clinician.   Furthermore, the data is being collected for a knowledge base to "see the low-hanging fruit," Nylin said. "We'd like to use the analytics to see where we can improve efficiencies."   The Critical Alert tool captures data from clinical workflow, allowing staff to analyze the data points into the nurse call system, according to Josh Troop, marketing director for Critical Alert.   "We're working with companies like STANLEY, to create something much more valuable than two equal parts," Troop said. "In this case, we were able to leverage the STANLEY investment that Genesis already made to ramp up our tools already. Our systems work together seamlessly in the background."   For STANLEY, it's about making sure "clinicians have more time to spend with the patient to improve the care arena," Nadav Barkaee, product manager for integrations, STANLEY Healthcare said. "One of the major benefits of being able to offer an enterprise-grade RTLS solution is to make sure the investment can be used across multiple solutions for staff efficiencies and workflow."   Genesis plans to implement the systems at four more of its hospitals in the near future.

The number of chief nursing informatics officers has increased in health systems over the past five years, with more designated CNIO-positions than ever before. The bump comes at a time when the need to bridge the gap between clinical and informatics increasing, according to a recent report commissioned by the workforce search firm Witt/Kieffer.   The research team surveyed 100 respondents from medical centers, independent hospitals and hospitals part of a larger health system to examine the evolving role of the CNIO and whether organizations are recruiting for the position to support the informatics landscape. These results were compared to a similar survey conducted in 2011.   Overall, there are 10 percent more CNIOs in place in organizations than compared to 2011, according to Chris Wierz, principal, Witt/Kieffer Information Technology Practice. While some organizations have created the position of CNIO, others have modified roles to incorporate the CNIO title.   "CNIOs now have a 'seat at the table," Wierz told Healthcare IT News. "From a CNIO perspective, it's so much about collaboration and consensus building; getting those groups of people together when it comes to IT. It's always been about trying to bring disparate groups together to understand the workflow around the electronic medical records and today's IT."   "Communication is a very large role, as well," she added, "acting as a translator between IT and my clinical staff. The ability to articulate your knowledge of IT and clinical is critical in this role."   Depending on the organization, the CNIO is responsible for EMR implementation, clinical IT, optimization of nursing strategy as it relates to IT, and creating a picture of day-to-day operation on clinical IT matters, Wierz said.   Despite the need to bridge these departments, Wierz said there are still many barriers to overcome before the role becomes more commonplace. "One of the reasons this role isn’t gaining enough traction is that there's an IT resistance to it."   Some organizations are lacking the funding for establishing the CNIO position, while other hospitals indicated their organization wasn't big enough to require one, according to the survey.   "Some people will say the reason why they're not implementing a CNIO is because then are you going to need even more "chief" roles," she added. "It's going to be interesting to see whether the CNIO turns into a chief clinical role to help with daily operations."   Twitter: @JessieFDavis Email the writer: jessica.davis@himssmedia.com

The CERT Division of Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute has released its list of 10 technologies emerging in the next five years with the greatest vulnerabilities in terms of cybersecurity, finance, personal health and safety.

Aurora, Colorado-based UCHealth has partnered again with LeanTaaS, a Silicon Valley-based predictive analytics startup. It will implement iQueue for Operating Rooms, which combines lean principles with advanced data tools for operating room utilization improvements. The flagship University of Colorado Hospital is the first of the system's five hospitals to deploy iQueue for Operating Rooms; UCHealth plans to integrate the platform at its other hospitals within the next year. The iQueue platform taps into UCHealth's Epic EHR and analyzes OR usage patterns to determine how to reallocate time to surgeons for improved efficiency. There's also a mobile feature that connects surgeons to the platform with real-time data for OR block management. "Sometimes it's really hard to just look at data and say, what do I do with this? How do I make the data work for the organization?" said University of Colorado Hospital Chief Information Officer Steve Hess. "The data may be there, but we all need to ask ourselves, is the data creating the story that we need? [Also: Analytics works wonders in Colorado] "With its machine learning and tools pushing data to surgeons, these are the changes that LeanTaaS is doing that will make the difference," Hess said. "This is actually retrospective and predictive. Not only will it tell us about OR usage, but it can also tell us what's happening and where it's going." By deploying this platform into the complex OR scheduling challenges facing UCHealth, the organization hopes to tackle capacity issues, improve OR utilization and workflow, according to Hess. Moving the needle just 1 percent, on one OR room can contribute to the bottom line and improve efficiencies, he said. "The combination of analytics, real-time data and block release and assignment exchange platform for smartphones: We see it as a game changer," Hess said. "It's too early to tell what kind of utilization we'll see, but we do expect this to be extremely positive." This is the second time UCHealth has turned to LeanTaas to improve its hospital operations. This past fall, the health system deployed LeanTaaS' iQueue for Infusion Centers across its entire system. Its success drove the decision to bring the technology into its operating room scheduling, Hess said. Twitter: @JessieFDavis Email the writer: jessica.davis@himssmedia.com Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook and LinkedIn

IBM plans to launch a cloud-based version of Watson's cognitive computing technology, designed solely to zero in on cybersecurity language, as a part of a year-long research project, the company announced Tuesday. The Watson for Cyber Security platform is touted as the first technology to offer cognition of security data. Watson will pull the majority of its cognitive data from the X-Force research library: a threat intelligence platform with 20 years of security research, details on 8 million spam and phishing attacks and more than 100,000 documented vulnerabilities. "Even if the industry was able to fill the estimated 1.5 million open cybersecurity jobs by 2020, we'd still have a skills crisis in security," Marc van Zadelhoff, general manager of IBM Security said in a statement. "The volume and velocity of data in security is one of our greatest challenges in dealing with cybercrime." [Also: IBM Watson offers free storage to Apple ResearchKit developers] Beginning in the fall, IBM will also collaborate with eight universities to expand the amount of security data the company has already inputted into the platform. California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; Pennsylvania State University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and New York University are among the institutions who will work with IBM to contribute to Watson's training. The students will also train Watson on cybersecurity language, while working close with IBM's security experts to learn how to read security intelligence to gain first-hand experience in cognitive security. IBM plans to process up to 15,000 security documents – threat intelligence reports, cybercrime strategies, threat databases – each month over the next training stages in collaboration will all stakeholders. Watson for Cybersecurity will not only provide insights on any emerging threats, it will also make recommendations on how to stop them. Additionally, the system will use data mining techniques to find outliers. IBM will begin beta production deployments later this year. "By leveraging Watson’s ability to bring context to staggering amounts of unstructured data, impossible for people alone to process, we will bring new insights, recommendations and knowledge to security professionals," said van Zadelhoff, "bringing greater speed and precision to the most advanced cybersecurity analysts, and providing novice analysts with on-the-job training."