Vendor Notebook: new partnerships around AI, VBC, virtual care and more
Several new announcements show that providers, including Brightside Health and Tampa General Hospital, are looking to improve patient outcomes and experiences with artificial intelligence and innovative care modalities.
Technology providers, including InterSystems, CLEAR and Innovaccer, have also formed new partnerships that streamline data management, promote secure interoperability and track operational performance.
Brightside adds virtual SUD care
Brightside Health is expanding into substance abuse care through virtual care by acquiring Lionrock Recovery and its intensive outpatient telehealth program, the company announced Wednesday.
Integrating virtual intensive outpatient care for addiction in subsequent quarters will expand Brightside’s offering of telematic services, including the treatment of anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation and alcohol use disorders, the mental health provider said in a statement.
The acquisition will enable Brightside to help improve access to addiction treatment, which has increased significantly following the onset of the opioid epidemic and due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control said it measured a 39% increase in addiction cases between 2018 and 2021, according to the company.
“Substance use has been catastrophic for families, communities, payers and health care systems,” Brad Kittredge, co-founder and CEO of Brightside Health, said in a statement.
Adding to the impact, the government did not include the absence of behavioral health in the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009, says Jeremy Bloom, CEO of NorthSight Recovery, a behavioral health organization in Arizona.
That “left many facilities at the back of the line for technology and financing,” he said Healthcare IT news last year when the agency implemented electronic health records and began exchanging data with its health information exchange to improve care coordination and access to addiction treatment.
“By offering substance abuse programs, we are now treating more patients with modalities designed to address specific and complex conditions, including addiction and dual diagnosis,” added Dr. Mimi Winsberg, co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Brightside Health.
InterSystems adds identity verification
This week, interoperability vendor InterSystems announced a new partnership with secure identity company CLEAR, which it said would transform the experiences of patients and healthcare providers.
InterSystems said it will integrate enhanced identity verification into its Health Gateway Service, to improve the efficiency and accuracy of patient data management and make patient check-in and pre-registration processes smoother.
“Wellstar introduced CLEAR to our patient check-in process to make confirming identity both seamless and more secure,” said Dr. Hank Capps, executive vice president and chief information and digital officer for Wellstar Health System and president of Catalyst by Wellstar, said in a statement.
The integration will simplify and accelerate secure access to patient medical history for the Gateway service by collecting, deduplicating and aggregating patient data from national networks such as Care Quality, eHealth Exchange and CommonWell, InterSystems said.
In addition to the improved efficiency and accuracy of data management that can result from linking a patient’s identity to their medical history, physicians will have access to medical data from multiple physicians and specialists, allowing them to improve patient outcomes and provide more personalized care offer.
“CLEAR’s Verified Identity technology has transformed the airport experience for millions of travelers,” Don Woodlock, head of global healthcare solutions at InterSystems, noted in the announcement.
“Similarly, CLEAR’s technology combined with the InterSystems Health Gateway Service will transform the patient and caregiver experience by streamlining the patient check-in and pre-registration process, giving physicians an immediate, clear and complete view of the patient, even before their first visit,” he said.
“Through our partnership with InterSystems, we will reduce friction for both patients and healthcare providers by securely confirming your identity,” added Caryn Seidman Becker, CEO of CLEAR.
Innovaccer children’s group taps for VBC
Innovaccer, an AI and analytics company, announced this month that Pediatrics Associates, a national primary care and telehealth service, will leverage its data and population health management platform to advance analytics and workflows and accelerate its value-based care initiatives.
Pediatric Associates, the largest private pediatric primary care group in the United States with 1.5 million patients in seven states, will be able to create unified patient records by integrating data from electronic health records, health information exchanges and payers for a 360-degree view of patients, according to Company.
High-quality personalized care is challenged by care coordination and the need to scale capabilities, explains Dr. Amanda Furr, vice president of public health at Pediatrics Associates, said in the statement.
“We understand the value of data analytics, risk adjustment, closing quality gaps and empowering pediatricians to improve outcomes.”
Innovaccer’s AI platform provides customizable predictive analytics dashboards that track quality, risk, cost, usage and other performance factors. It can also automate transition care management, build patient registries, identify coding opportunities and track quality measures, the company said, noting that its EHR-agnostic application InNote promotes interoperability.
“The Innovaccer platform increases our understanding of patient populations and helps us make accurate diagnoses, create and automate TCM protocols, and close gaps in care,” Furr added.
“Pediatric Associates has an impressive track record of managing more than 1.5 million lives through Medicaid and commercial contracts,” Abhinav Shashank, co-founder and CEO of Innovaccer, said in the announcement.
Tampa General to expand use of AI
Tampa General Hospital announced June 5 that it has extended its long-term partnership with Palantir through 2032. The hospital will use the company’s artificial intelligence platform to power eligibility and prioritization workflows for frontline teams and improve revenue cycle management and other automation.
The Care Coordination Operating System will encode Tampa General’s domain expertise, real-time situational awareness and large language models into decision support tools, according to a statement.
Tampa General will also use the AI platform analytics to assess care effectiveness through a new Hospital Syncapplication suite, including AI-powered workflows for bed placement, patient routing and staff assignment.
The partners began working together in 2021 and said they have since expanded to more than a dozen use cases across the healthcare system, reducing patient wait times and length of stay. Results include reducing post-anesthesia care units by 28% and reducing the average length of stay for sepsis patients by 30%.
“Reduced time waiting for placement and shorter length of stay not only improves the patient experience, it also gives us the opportunity to treat more patients in need of care,” John Couris, president and CEO of Tampa General, said in a statement.
“These improvements, enabled by data and technology, contribute to better and more robust treatment plans, which in turn can lead to better patient outcomes.”
Tampa General began pulling data from its EHR and previously created an early warning system that guided hospital staff reduce the rate of premature sepsis deaths in hospital from 6% to 4%told Dr. Peggy Duggan, executive vice president and chief medical officer of Tampa General Healthcare IT news last year.
“Our success metrics within our sepsis work focus on the overall process and not just the technology,” Duggan said. “Some of our biggest successes include activating our robust team focused on best practice sepsis care, developing evidence-based clinical pathways for sepsis care and aligning our order sets.”
Tampa General found that when sepsis patients received proper care, their mortality rate dropped from 23% to 7.5%. Getting that hard data also increased physicians’ use of those order sets from 27% to more than 70%, she said.
Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.