There’s no question that by propelling healthcare into the digital age, EMRs have been a fundamental first step in the journey toward transforming care delivery. But creating an environment capable of delivering real-time, patient-centric care that improves safety, quality outcomes, and population health requires enhancing these documentation and workflow systems with a new category of technology that leading healthcare analysts call Enterprise Intelligence Resources (EIR).
EIR platforms extend the value of EMRs by integrating disparate data generated from multiple sources to provide real-time clinical intelligence, business intelligence (BI) and predictive analytics. By providing a complete picture of what is happening in the moment, both to individual patients and at the institutional level, EIRs enable frontline clinicians and healthcare leaders to optimize care, support key quality initiatives — including core measures — and improve operational efficiency.
The real-time, actionable insights that EIRs deliver integrate seamlessly with clinical workflow to optimize interventions. This dramatically reduces patient risk and the treatment costs. VigiLanz is an integrated EIR platform that combines real-time clinical intelligence with BI and predictive modeling to enable providers to identify — based on their specific patient population data — at-risk patients earlier, with order-of-magnitude improvements in sensitivity and specificity.
A breakthrough path to predicting sepsis.
There’s no question that by propelling healthcare into the digital age, EMRs have been a fundamental first step in the journey toward transforming care delivery. But creating an environment capable of delivering real-time, patient-centric care that improves safety, quality outcomes, and population health requires enhancing these documentation and workflow systems with a new category of technology that leading healthcare analysts call Enterprise Intelligence Resources (EIR).
EIR platforms extend the value of EMRs by integrating disparate data generated from multiple sources to provide real-time clinical intelligence, business intelligence (BI) and predictive analytics. By providing a complete picture of what is happening in the moment, both to individual patients and at the institutional level, EIRs enable frontline clinicians and healthcare leaders to optimize care, support key quality initiatives — including core measures — and improve operational efficiency.
The real-time, actionable insights that EIRs deliver integrate seamlessly with clinical workflow to optimize interventions. This dramatically reduces patient risk and the treatment costs. VigiLanz is an integrated EIR platform that combines real-time clinical intelligence with BI and predictive modeling to enable providers to identify — based on their specific patient population data — at-risk patients earlier, with order-of-magnitude improvements in sensitivity and specificity.
Patient diagnostics are methodically and automatically monitored in real time, and clinicians are then alerted in real-time to initiate appropriate interventions resulting in significant reductions in sepsis morbidity and mortality. A similar approach can be used to address other potential patient safety risks, including DVT, C. Diff, MRSA, toxic hyperkalemia, glycemic control, surgery site infections (SSIs), medication errors and many others, as well as public health outbreaks such as Ebola, MERS, etc.
In this Q&A, VigiLanz Chairman and CEO David Goldsteen, M.D., M.B.A., and CTO Adam Klass discuss why EIRs are rapidly becoming must-have solutions for healthcare organizations as the demand for data-driven clinical and operational decision-making becomes increasingly urgent.
Health IT Outcomes: What are your key observations about the state of healthcare, in terms of access to — and utilization of — critical information?
Goldsteen: Healthcare has certainly made plenty of advances as far as utilizing and analyzing information for improving patient outcomes, managing population health, improving financial viability, and reducing risk. However, it’s time for a new, tighter approach to managing the massive volumes of data now being generated. In order to thrive in this era of value-based, accountable care, healthcare leaders need to view data as the raw material of clinical and business intelligence and develop ways to organize and deliver that intelligence in real-time to front-line clinical teams. Ultimately, the goal is to make the data work for the clinicians — and not vice-versa.
Health IT Outcomes: What do healthcare CEOs, CIOs, and CMIOs tell you are the biggest challenges they face today?
Goldsteen: The good news is that EMRs are generating enormous amounts of data about patients and their care. But I hear many C-level executives asking, “Now what?” Healthcare providers face intense pressure to better utilize data to improve the quality of care. The challenge is how to turn this data into true intelligence that can be used by the clinicians on the front lines treating patients. There’s an awareness that the EMR is not enough and is not a strategy in and of itself for delivering real-time healthcare.
Klass: I frequently hear, “Why is managing the information in my system so difficult?” The short answer, to reinforce what David said, is that EMRs are simply not designed to deliver real-time intelligence. The rigidity inherent in these platforms makes it difficult to rapidly organize and connect disparate data sets coming from different sources such as EMRs, medical devices, digital imaging, wearables, labs, payers and the government. If we truly want to transform care delivery, we need to fully harness the power of this data in real-time.
Health IT Outcomes: You’ve said that EMRs are not enough. What additional pieces are necessary to complete the equation?
Goldsteen: We need to push the boundaries of traditional healthcare capabilities with advanced analytics and intelligence that provide real-time decision support. EIR platforms take information resources and assets to a new level by integrating, organizing, normalizing and leveraging them to provide actionable clinical intelligence, business intelligence and predictive analytics in real-time. As a result, EIRs can impact areas such as infection control, antimicrobial stewardship, adverse drug events, quality surveillance analytics and predictive modeling to improve healthcare delivery.
Klass: Sepsis is a great example of the ability of EIRs to make a positive impact on patient care. Every year, sepsis affects more than one million patients, causes 280,000 deaths, and accounts for 40 percent of ICU spending. By integrating real-time clinical intelligence and predictive modeling, EIRs enable providers to identify at-risk patients earlier, intervene earlier when necessary and closely monitor patient progress. The result has been double-digit reductions in sepsis occurrence. And the same approach can be used with other potential patient safety risks, from hospital-acquired infections to medication errors to hotspot disease trends.
Health IT Outcomes: What are some of the features of EIR platforms that empower informed decision-making and deliver measurable ROI?
Klass: EIR platforms that are delivered in an exceptionally secure, redundant and highly available cloud-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS) model require no additional hardware or software and can be quickly and seamlessly integrated with existing EMR systems. They’re interoperable, so they can interface with any data set, EMR or IT system, and they have true real-time capacity. This enables them to process EMR and other data every one to two minutes and deliver alerts tailored to individual patient information. The platforms also have continuous learning capacity. Constant clinical surveillance powered by proprietary metadata and analytics can determine causal relationships, predictive patterns and drive quality improvement.
About The Participants
David Goldsteen, M.D., M.B.A., is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer and Adam Klass is Chief Technology Officer of VigiLanz, a leading provider of SaaS healthcare intelligence and predictive analytics. VigiLanz supports a large and growing community of hospital CMOs, CMIOs, CIOs, quality teams, infectious disease and control specialists, pharmacists and other clinicians dedicated to real-time inpatient and outpatient care. www.vigilanzcorp.com
