Several recent announcements show that providers including Brightside Health and Tampa General Hospital are seeking to improve patient outcomes and experiences through artificial intelligence and groundbreaking care methods.
Technology providers including InterSystems, CLEAR and Innovaccer have also formed recent partnerships that improve data management, promote secure interoperability and track operational performance.
Brightside Adds Virtual SUD Care
The company announced Wednesday that Brightside Health is expanding into the care of people with substance utilize disorders through virtual care by acquiring Lionrock Recovery and its intensive outpatient telehealth program.
The integration of virtual intensive outpatient services for SUD in the coming quarters will expand Brightside’s suite of telemental services, which includes treatment for anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation and alcohol utilize disorders, the mental health treatment provider said in a statement.
The acquisition will enable Brightside to assist improve access to SUD treatment, which has increased significantly following the opioid epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the company, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control said it saw 39% more cases of SUD between 2018 and 2021.
“Substance use has had devastating consequences for families, communities, payers and health care systems,” Brad Kittredge, co-founder and CEO of Brightside Health, said in a statement.
Moreover, the government did not address behavioral health-related absenteeism in the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009, said Jeremy Bloom, CEO of NorthSight Recovery, a behavioral health agency in Arizona.
“It left many facilities on the sidelines in terms of technology and financing,” he said last year, when the agency implemented electronic health records and began sharing data through the Health Information Exchange to improve care coordination and access to SUDs.
“By offering substance use disorder treatment programs, we are now treating more patients with methods designed to treat 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 provider InterSystems announced a recent partnership with secure identity company CLEAR that it says will transform the patient and provider experience.
InterSystems said it will integrate enhanced identity verification into its Health Gateway service to improve the efficiency and accuracy of patient data management and streamline patient check-in and pre-registration processes.
“Wellstar has introduced CLEAR into our patient enrollment process to make identity confirmation both smoother and more secure,” said Dr. Hank Capps, executive vice president and chief information and digital officer at Wellstar Health System and president of Catalyst by Wellstar, in a statement.
According to InterSystems, the integration will simplify and accelerate secure access to patient medical records within the gateway service by collecting, deduplicating and aggregating patient data from national networks such as Care Quality, eHealth Exchange and CommonWell.
In addition to the increased efficiency and accuracy of data management that can result from linking a patient’s identity to his or her medical history, physicians will have access to medical data from multiple clinicians and specialists. This can assist them improve patient outcomes and provide more personalized care.
“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.
“In the same way, CLEAR technology combined with the InterSystems Health Gateway Service will transform the patient and provider experience by streamlining the patient check-in and pre-registration process, immediately providing clinicians with a clear and complete picture of the patient before their first visit,” he said.
“Through our partnership with InterSystems, we will reduce friction for both patients and providers by securely confirming your identity,” added Caryn Seidman Becker, CEO of CLEAR.
Pediatric group chooses Innovaccer for VBC
Innovaccer, an artificial intelligence and analytics company, announced this month that Pediatrics Associates, a national pediatric care and telehealth service, will leverage its data management and population health platform to improve analytics and workflows and accelerate data-driven care initiatives values.
Pediatric Associates, the largest privately held pediatric primary care group in the U.S. with 1.5 million patients in seven states, will be able to create a unified patient record by integrating data from electronic health records, health information exchange systems and payers to achieve a 360-degree picture of the patients’ situation, the company said.
The challenge for personalized, high-quality care is care coordination and the need to scale capacity, explained Dr. Amanda Furr, vice president of population health at Pediatrics Associates, in a statement.
“We understand the value of analyzing data, adjusting risk, closing quality gaps and empowering pediatric providers to improve outcomes.”
Innovaccer’s AI platform provides customizable predictive analytics dashboards that track quality, risk, cost, utilization and other performance factors. It can also automate transitional care management, create patient records, identify coding opportunities and track quality measures, the company said, noting that the EHR-agnostic InNote application promotes interoperability.
“The Innovaccer platform deepens our understanding of patient populations and helps us make accurate diagnoses, establish and automate TCM protocols, and fill gaps in healthcare,” Furr added.
“Pediatric Associates has an impressive track record of managing over 1.5 million lives under Medicaid and commercial contracts,” Abhinav Shashank, co-founder and CEO of Innovaccer, said in the announcement.
Tampa General expands utilize of artificial intelligence
On June 5, Tampa General Hospital announced that it had extended its long-term partnership with Palantir through 2032. The hospital will utilize the company’s artificial intelligence platform to streamline triage and prioritization workflows for frontline teams and improve revenue cycle management and other automation.
The care coordination operating system will encode Tampa General’s expertise, real-time situational awareness and immense language models into decision support tools, according to the statement.
Tampa General will also utilize the AI platform’s analytics to assess care effectiveness through its recent Hospital Syncapplication suite, which includes AI-powered workflows for bed placement, patient routing and staff assignments.
The partners, who launched their collaboration in 2021, said they have since expanded to more than a dozen utilize cases across the healthcare system, which has reduced patient wait times and length of stay. Achievements include reducing the number of post-anesthesia wards by 28% and reducing the average length of stay for sepsis patients by 30%.
“Reduced wait times for placement and shorter lengths of stay not only improve the patient experience, but give us the ability to treat more patients who need care,” John Couris, president and CEO of Tampa General, said in a statement.
“These data- and technology-driven improvements are contributing 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 had previously created an early warning system to guide hospital staff reduce the rate of early deaths in hospital due to sepsis from 6% to 4%Dr. Peggy Duggan, executive vice president and chief medical officer of Tampa General, said last year.
“Our success metrics in sepsis work focus on the entire process, not just the technology,” Duggan said. “Some of our greatest successes include activating our strong team focused on best sepsis management practices, developing evidence-based clinical sepsis care pathways, and standardizing our order sets.”
Tampa General found that when sepsis patients received appropriate care, their mortality rate dropped from 23% to 7.5%. Obtaining this strenuous data also increased physicians’ utilize of these sets of recommendations from 27% to more than 70%, she said.