Decision Support

The American Medical Association and MedStar Health examined how physicians used Cerner and Epic electronic health records, and found a lot variability that could impact safety.

Health Catalyst announced a new surveillance module for its Patient Safety Monitor suite that aims to help hospitals protect patient safety by deploying predictive analytics to monitor, predict and prevent inpatient risk. Built atop the Health Catalyst Data Operating System, the new module was developed over two years of intensive and expensive research – nearly $50 million, the company said. It's a trigger-based surveillance system, incorporating predictive algorithms and artificial intelligence, that can spot patterns of harm and offer decision support to address potential hazards. By combining text analytics and near real-time data from multiple sources, the technology can detect safety risk for inpatients. Health Catalyst noted that the standard approach of manual reporting of hospital safety events, often using data that is at least 30 days old, reportedly finds less than 5 percent of all-cause harm. Meanwhile many electronic health records and data warehouses have drawbacks of their own, missing the AI capabilities that could enable wider surveillance. Many hospitals, therefore, are limited in their approach to patient safety, using point solutions focused on specific risks, rather than whole-person safety. As part of its patient safety efforts, Health Catalyst has applied for certification as a Patient Safety Organization with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. If approved, the Health Catalyst PSO will offer an environment where hospital clients can collect and analyze patient safety events from their EHRs to learn and improve, the company said. The surveillance technology release comes on the heels of Health Catalyst completing the acquisition of Medicity from Aetna to expand its footprint in the outpatient space and combine analytics with HIE. The merger adds Medicitiy's 75 health system clients, with more than 1,000 hospitals and 185,000-plus physicians, in addition to nearly two-dozen HIEs as well as payers and employers. In an interview, Health Catalyst CEO Dan Burton said the company will leverage Medicity’s data sets and transactional capabilities to complement its own analytics tools and help its clients maker smarter, data-driven decisions to enable value-based care. "We've amassed a big data set focused more on the acute care setting, which is were we grew up, whereas Medicity has strong transactional capabilities that are really a complement to our analytics space capabilities, and they're more ambulatory focused," Burton said. By adding Medicity's technology, Health Catalyst expands its reach beyond its existing client base of 400 hospitals and 4,000 ambulatory sites, bringing real-time analytics right to the workflow inpatient and outpatient EHRs, he said. "Clinically integrated networks and others have rightly noted a gap in Health Catalyst's experience set with real-time transactional capabilities," said Burton. "Offering that data exchange capability, in-depth, is not something we've had a great answer for." Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com

CDS vendors are working to incorporate AI and machine learning into their products to boost diagnostics, imaging, pathology and radiology.

The artificial intelligence tool detects diabetic retinopathy in medical images, which can help prevent blindness in diabetes patients.

Integrating Jvion cognitive computing technology is part of the institute’s plan to transform healthcare by boosting quality and outcomes.

Healthpoint, its hospital in Abu Dhabi, hopes the new technology will help it advance from Stage 6 to Stage 7 on the HIMSS Analytics EMR Adoption Model.

Submissions for speaking opportunities at the health IT conference are open until July 16.

The apps will be evaluated in 10 different primary and specialty care settings.

The HIMSS Big Data and Healthcare Analytics Forum showed that, even if healthcare still lags behind other industries in analytics prowess, it can (and probably will) make up a lot of ground in a short time.

As many as 80 percent of sepsis deaths could be prevented with rapid diagnosis and treatment, which is why Halifax has brought together this triumvirate of health IT for prescriptive alerts.