What You Should Know:

– Xandar Kardian, a Toronto-based leader in developing radar signal processing technology for vital sign monitoring, has formally announced an integrated partnership with Caregility, an enterprise telehealth leader dedicated to connecting care for patients and clinicians everywhere.

– For the first time ever, Xandar Kardian will embed its radar technology and data into a partner’s existing product line, joining Caregility’s Best in KLAS Caregility Cloud™ virtual care ecosystem to create a solution wholly focused on optimizing acute patient care. 

– Xandar Kardian’s partnership with Caregility, which will begin rolling out across facilities this spring, will increase capacity for staff to virtually observe and manage higher-acuity patients in a traditional med-surg environment while leveraging a workflow and connectivity they are already familiar with.

What You Should Know:

•  IntelyCare, the leading total healthcare talent solution in post-acute care, today introduced a new technology partnership with UKG, a leading provider of HR, payroll, and workforce management solutions for all people.
• IntelyCare’s AI-based platform and per-diem matching technology enable healthcare organizations to increase census revenue and cut staffing costs. With more than 315 technology and services partners, UKG provides one of the largest and most collaborative partner ecosystems in the HCM industry focused on creating better employee experiences to improve business outcomes.

A Collaboration to Reduce Costs, Improve Patient Experience, and Increase Revenue

This collaboration will allow healthcare organizations that utilize both IntelyCare and UKG Dimensions to increase workforce management efficiencies by enabling the scheduling and management of full-time, temporary, float, per-diem, and contract staff on a seamless interface. With the integration, organizations can view and fill open shifts at multiple facilities – with both internal and contingent staff available through IntelyCare – without having to leave UKG Dimensions.

“The large UKG customer-base of hospitals, health systems, and long-term care facilities paired with our pool of 50,000 per diem nursing professionals helps address the nurse staffing crisis head-on,” said David Coppins, co-founder and CEO of IntelyCare. Coppins continued, “Using the UKG Dimensions scheduling solution in tandem with IntelyCare’s nursing per diem and float pool management platform empowers healthcare facilities to increase revenue, reduce operational costs, improve outcomes, and stabilize their workforce.”

The integration provides a single view for facilities to directly communicate and engage with their staff and seamlessly schedule both their internal and external staff to ensure that they maintain proper staffing levels. For facilities that employ float pool staff, the integration also opens up IntelyCare’s float pool management technology, utilizing AI-driven pricing and matching capabilities to optimize the scheduling of flexible staff.

UKG solutions are developed on the FleX platform. FleX by UKG is a modern technology platform purpose-built to support great workplaces. FleX Flow, a highly adaptable API framework, anchors UKG solutions in the flow of work where people need and want them most, and helps businesses connect existing IT with innovative or emerging applications to simplify the employee IT experience.

What You Should Know:

– MedArrive, a Mobile-integrated care management platform company today announced $8M in new funding led by Cobalt Ventures, a wholly owned subsidiary of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City (Blue KC). The investment follows MedArrive’s $25 million series A round in November 2021 and brings the company’s total funding to $40.5M to date

– MedArrive plans to use the new investment to expand its payer relationships, build out its team and platform, and scale its business into new markets.

White-Labeled Care Management

MedArrive supports both adult and pediatric populations, providing a white-labeled care management solution that powers care into the home – often for the hardest-to-reach, disengaged and most-vulnerable populations. It connects providers and payers with MedArrive’s field provider network of highly trained and skilled paramedics, EMTs and other healthcare professionals. These field providers visit the homes of patients or members on behalf of their provider or health plan, providing a mix of in-home healthcare services, diagnostics, health assessments, post-acute care and other preventive health measures – while also addressing social care needs like transportation, mobility or nutrition assistance.

When higher-acuity care is needed, field providers will connect people with physician-led telehealth services. The MedArrive platform also includes integrations with a growing ecosystem of specialized partners, which allows field providers to bring even more care services into the home such as virtual behavioral health, retinal screening and maternity care.

“Everyone in America has a right to inclusive, high-quality care, yet too many are left out and have no one on their side who can connect them to the system. That’s what the MedArrive platform and our field providers offer – a trusted and compassionate bridge into the homes of the people who need care the most and at the right time,” said MedArrive CEO and Co-founder Dan Trigub. “The work we are doing with dedicated healthcare organizations, who are committed to health equity, is what drives our team every day, and we are honored to receive this strategic investment from Cobalt Ventures.”

About one out of five Americans with serious illness struggled to access care during the pandemic, and rates were significantly higher among disadvantaged populations, a 2022 study found. Now, as mental health-related visits in emergency departments (EDs) continue to rise, healthcare professionals must consider: “How can we create better behavioral health supports for people in crisis?”

It’s a question that has significant implications for quality of care as well as cost.

The High Cost of Poor Behavioral Healthcare

A recent study indicates 10% of patients account for 70% of the nation’s costs and that more than half of these patients have a diagnosed mental health disorder. When these individuals face mental health challenges, they often seek care in the ED—the point of least resistance to care access—because they lack quick access to care in lower-cost settings. 

But EDs are ill-equipped to treat these complex health issues. Not only do ED staff lack the time and training to deliver the nuanced behavioral health assessments and treatment these individuals need, but the often noisy, fast-paced ED environment makes it difficult to provide this type of care. In addition, the complexities associated with finding the appropriate follow-up care for patients’ behavioral health needs create “a cycle of ED help-seeking behaviors and mental states that worsen with early discharge,” researchers say.

Now, as Medicare and Medicaid continue to move toward value-based contracts, developing practical strategies for meeting the behavioral health needs of vulnerable populations has become even more critical. But too often, hospitals and health systems direct resources toward population-specific solutions without seeing significant change. That’s an approach healthcare organization can no longer afford to take, given already-significant pressures on margins and staff.

Innovating for a Better Behavioral Care Encounter

Innovative organizations are finding value in solutions that better identify patients’ behavioral health needs at the point of care and connect these patients with the appropriate outside support. Here are three examples of behavioral health innovations in the ED that are making a difference in quality of care, patient health and cost.

1. Receiving real-time alerts at the point of care. When it comes to behavioral health crises, timely intervention is everything. Across the country, innovative EDs rely on real-time notifications pushed directly into the EHR to rapidly identify behavioral health patients with multiple behavioral health-related ED visits and alert appropriate care team members. These data feeds supply information from the health professional’s own facility as well as other area hospitals, primary and behavioral healthcare providers, and health systems.
   
   By enabling ED staff to quickly bring in and coordinate their efforts with those who are familiar with the patient’s case, both immediate treatment and ongoing follow-up care improve. For example, staff at Rappahannock Area Community Services Board (RACSB), based in Fredericksburg, Va, receive alerts when a patient with a behavioral health-related challenge has recorded five ED visits within the past 12 months. Within seconds of the patient’s arrival, real-time notifications are delivered to the members of the patient’s care team—including specialty physicians and case managers—who are best positioned to intervene. As a result, patient care, workflows, and documentation improve, allowing RACSB to leverage data through the platform, identify homelessness as a key need for many of these patients, and obtain a $819,577 grant to build supportive housing for individuals with serious mental illness.

2. Providing 24/7, personalized support for patients with high utilization. Not all crises occur between 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and studies have shown that the timing of a crisis can play a critical role in patient outcomes. In fact, one 2020 study shows increased ED admissions on nights and weekends, a time when specialized providers may be less available. As a result, poorer health outcomes were reported for patients who were admitted to the ED outside traditional business hours.
   
   Successfully meeting the needs of vulnerable behavioral health populations requires putting systems in place to ensure personalized behavioral health support is available 24/7. This means improving in-house, after-hours staffing. It also means assigning community workers that know the individual’s circumstances and are available 24/7 to meet with the patient in real-time at the point of care. Having this assigned support ensures that reliable information regarding care plans, lists of current medications, and names of key service providers and community organizations with whom the patient is connected are readily available to ED staff in moments of crisis, further improving health outcomes and reducing costs of care.

For the High Utilizers of Virginia program, a state-based program dedicated to reducing unnecessary ED utilization among individuals with behavioral health needs, use of real-time alerts and 24/7 access to community health workers cut ED visits for this population by one-third within one year. Other results include a 94% reduction in state hospital psychiatric admissions, an 84% drop in state psychiatric hospital admit days and more than $2 million in savings—without compromising the quality of care.

3. Building trust by prioritizing rapport. Robust patient data is key to anticipating and shaping patterns of behavior. For example, data may reveal that a patient is prone to arrive in the ED on the weekends when a patient’s routine care team is not available. It might also highlight social determinants of health exacerbating a patient’s mental health challenges, such as lack of stable housing, challenges acquiring prescribed medicines, or food insecurity. Unfortunately, without trust, the patient is unlikely to open up about these challenges.
   
   Medical mistrust, especially from traditionally marginalized populations, continues to be a barrier to providing both physical and behavioral health care. Increasing awareness and expanding the diversity of staff is an important part of addressing this issue, but behavioral health professionals suggest that even the most diverse staff will struggle to identify outstanding needs if sufficient time for rapport building and assessment is not provided. Trained community workers, or even peer support, can help close this gap by providing an affordable alternative to increasing the time spent by doctors and case managers in developing the rapport necessary to conduct the necessary assessments. It’s a move that protects patients’ health while reducing the stress on ED resources and staff.   

By optimizing the ED encounter with real-time data, patient-specific context, and 24-7 community support, health systems can create more time for the behavioral health encounter, reducing unnecessary use of the ED while making a significant difference in patient outcomes and costs of care. 

About Ben A. Zaniello, MD MPH

Ben A. Zaniello, MD MPH, is the Chief Medical Officer of PointClickCare, the largest Post-Acute and Acute Care Network in North America. He has worked in care transformation for over a decade, formerly at Collective Medical, which PointClickCare acquired in 2020. Before Collective, Dr. Zaniello worked at Providence Health, the 53 Hospital Seattle-based health system as their Chief Medical Information Officer in Population Health.

About Dr. Enrique Enguidanos

Dr. Enrique Enguidanos is the founder and CEO of CBC Solutions and has over 20 years of clinical experience in Emergency Medicine, much of this time also serving in organizational and systems management roles. For well over a decade he has developed and fine-tuned systems of care and community management systems that have proven very effective for frequent utilizers, and that is now organized in a manner that allows CBCS to continuously reproduce care results across varying communities and health care systems.

What You Should Know:

– Vital, an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven digital health company improving the patient experience, today announced that it has raised $24.7M in Series B funding to fuel expansion and support the rapid growth of its modern software. The investment round led by Transformation Capital, with support from Threshold Ventures, strategic health system investors and Vital CEO / Mint.com creator Aaron Patzer, brings Vital’s total funding to over $40M.

– Vital’s solutions make it easier for healthcare providers and health systems to communicate with and engage patients during emergency department (ED) and inpatient visits.

Navigate and manage emergency department and inpatient visits

Launched in 2019 and co-founded by Aaron Patzer and Emergency Medicine Physician Dr. Justin Schrager, Vital’s platform, powered by AI and natural language processing (NLP), keeps patients in-network, generates millions in revenue for health systems and improves the care experience – through actionable and personalized patient content, automated communication and real-time feedback. Vital is a leader in the acute care patient experience with over 100 hospitals and 31 health systems nationwide.

Vital’s ERAdvisor software for the emergency department and CareAdvisor solution for inpatient care settings provide a modern, consumer-focused experience, driving revenue and staff satisfaction, while impacting thousands of patients and families every day. The company’s easy-to-use solutions are accessible via a patient’s mobile phone and available with no download or password required.

Recent Milestones

Vital achieved significant growth over the past year, partnering with over 40 new hospital clients including facilities across Allina Health, CommonSpirit Health and Emory Healthcare, expanding its software solutions into the inpatient setting, launching new features including its Experience Management and Lab Results tools, and adding seasoned industry veterans in technology and health to its teams. The Series B financing fuels continued operational and technology advancement, with plans to further expand the team and launch new features aimed at enhancing clinical decision support, care coordination and patient experience. The company is on pace to impact over one million patient lives and support 100,000 clinical tasks in 2023.

“Healthcare providers and health systems are faced with a growing list of pressures that all-too-often make it difficult to provide the best care for patients,” said Aaron Patzer, CEO of Vital. “Our beautiful and intelligent software keeps patients engaged and informed, while automating tasks for staff who manage emergency department visits and inpatient stays. With this funding, we will advance the impact of our technology for patients, families and clinicians.”

– TytoCare, a virtual care company enabling accessible, high-quality primary care from home, today announced that it received FDA clearance for its Tyto Insights for Wheeze Detection, paving the way for its rollout in the US.

– The wheeze detection algorithm expands the company’s existing AI-powered Tyto Insights™ smart diagnostic capabilities, filling the quality gaps currently experienced with traditional telehealth and alleviating challenges imposed by the ongoing shortage of healthcare professionals.

AI-Driven Upgrades to TytoCare’s Home Smart Clinic Solutions to Expand Acute Care and Chronic Condition Management

Tyto InsightsTM for Wheeze Detection is designed to aid in the clinical assessment of lung sound data for adults and children aged two and above, enabling clinicians to accurately diagnose respiratory conditions remotely. Fueled by TytoCare’s own database of lung sounds – the largest of its kind – the AI-powered decision support software automatically analyzes lung sounds recorded by TytoCare’s FDA-cleared handheld remote exam device’s stethoscope to determine whether wheezing is detected. Whenever a remote lung exam is carried out with TytoCare, Tyto Insights for Wheeze Detection prompts a clinician if a specific abnormal lung sound suggestive of wheezing is suspected. 

The FDA clearance comes as TytoCare is continually strengthening its offerings to provide the best possible virtual primary care from home with its Home Smart Clinic. By expanding its clinical decision support, Tyto Insights for Wheeze Detection bolsters the Home Smart Clinic’s support of acute care and long-term care for chronic conditions, many of which are respiratory in nature, and helps to alleviate challenges posed by the ongoing healthcare professional shortage. To date, TytoCare has found that respiratory diagnoses constitute over 40% of all diagnoses made using its virtual care solution, reflecting both the common nature of respiratory illnesses and conditions including asthma across patient populations, as well as TytoCare’s unique ability to provide optimal virtual care for the large numbers of patients with respiratory symptoms by offering remote auscultation.

“Our Tyto Insight capabilities, including our wheeze detection algorithm, furthers our goal of enhancing the virtual care experience for all patients, clinicians, providers, and health plans – not just by increasing the quality of care and expanding our chronic care management capabilities, but also by further assisting clinicians and specialists to make informed and accurate diagnoses remotely,” said Dedi Gilad, CEO and Co-Founder of TytoCare. “At TytoCare, we have the world’s largest database of lung and heart sounds, as well as related symtoms and vital signs, and we will continue to leverage it to provide superb quality of care for families worldwide.”

TytoCare’s Home Smart Clinic was introduced to solve the Home Healthcare Delivery Gap™ that patients experience with traditional audio/video-only telehealth solutions. The solution combines TytoCare’s FDA-cleared handheld remote examination device, the AI-backed Tyto Insights™ smart diagnosis support, including the Wheeze Detection, and the Tyto Engagement Labs™ configured for each specific program and cohort to provide high-quality, accessible virtual care in the home and enable health plans and providers to deliver on expected ROI and drive improved health outcomes. The Tyto Insights for Wheeze Detection already bears the CE Mark for usage by clinicians in Europe.

What You Should Know:

– Veta Health and Indiana-based Interactive Digital Solutions (IDS) announced their strategic partnership to expand IDS’s virtual care offerings through an exclusive reseller agreement.

– The adoption of telehealth and virtual care has surged since the Covid-19 pandemic and the demand for solutions that extend beyond virtual visits is high. The partnership enables hospitals and health systems to contract with a single organization to provide a comprehensive virtual care solution in ambulatory and acute care settings.

AI-enabled Prosper Platform

Veta Health’s AI-enabled Prosper Platform enables hospitals and health systems to engage patients beyond the four walls of the hospital or doctor’s office. Its clinically-validated care pathways are coupled with a turn-key virtual care solution that provides an enterprise-wide infrastructure to support nearly all areas of remote clinical care. This includes pre-configured software, devices, and nurse-led clinical staffing. This 3-pronged solution allows providers to implement and scale virtual care offerings with ease without worrying about providing additional logistics or support. Veta Health’s unique approach to virtual care yields engagement rates that are as much as 10x higher than the industry standard.

American health systems, hospitals and post-acute care providers are required to comply with hundreds of regulatory requirements. Facilitating this compliance comes with a high cost. According to the American Hospital Association, the average-sized community hospital spends nearly $7.6 million annually on administrative activities to support regulatory compliance. With the impending end of the COVID-19 public health emergency set to shake up healthcare regulations, ongoing healthcare labor shortages, and skyrocketing levels of clinician burnout, a perfect storm for non-compliance is brewing. 

Even with significant investments in administration to support compliance, overwhelmed providers can inadvertently leave gaps in security, access and credentialing systems. As a result, health systems may face stiff penalties and fines; significant reputational damage; and even the potential loss of critical Medicare contracts. 

Fortunately, technology is available to help bridge these compliance gaps, enabling hospitals to take a more proactive approach to create a safe environment for patients, staff and visitors.

What does an effective, tech-forward credentialing compliance program look like?

Identify and automate best practices to improve health system compliance and safety: 

To meet compliance obligations related to accreditation needs, healthcare organizations need to have policies and procedures to track vendor representatives who enter their facilities. This type of comprehensive vendor credentialing program can help prevent adverse events such as healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) by making it easier for business visitors to follow best practices and adhere to provider policies.

To be successful, security access procedures need to allow for:

– System-wide policy standardization

– Easy, fast and safe facility access 

In conventional security and access programs, this requires substantial investment in labor costs and administrative time and still leaves the facility vulnerable to human error. With compliance technology tools, hospital systems can benefit from automated capabilities and real-time reports, as well as insights into the performance of various security measures that can accelerate the process of standardizing credentialing procedures.

Secure facility with automation: 

An important part of any vendor credentialing and visitor access program is to control on-site access and ensure the facility is secure. Through the use of connected infrastructure for automated vendor badging and monitoring, hospitals can help facilitate easy, fast and credentialed access for vendor representatives in compliance with required documentation and immunizations, as well as automated access denials if a vendor representative is not currently compliant. Further, these connected systems allow for periodic checks to whether a hospital’s registered vendor companies and representatives are not under federal or state sanctions, potentially triggering an automatic denial to the facility in response. 

With automation, hospitals can take their security and access programs a step further in efficiency, accuracy and completeness. Infrastructure, including touchless kiosks, mobile apps and other fast, contact-free check-in options for vendors, should connect to a centralized system for vendor credentialing and management. These automated access control systems help ensure standardized entry and save time and effort on the part of hospital workers.  

Centralize documentation and insights: 

To help protect patient and staff safety, hospitals must require documented evidence that vendors entering facilities have complied with health system policies. And to remain in compliance with The Joint Commission, HIPAA, OIG, and local regulatory agencies and maintain accreditation, providers must be prepared to produce this documentation demonstrating their vendor management procedures. This can leave hospital staff scrambling to locate the appropriate paperwork during audits. By centralizing document management, healthcare providers have access to this critical information. 

With insights, hospitals can speed up the time it takes to standardize credentialing procedures. Providing visibility into the performance of various measures can help hospital leaders make more informed decisions about the best ways to protect patients, staff and visitors.

Leverage credentialing compliance technology a step further with specialist input 

Credentialing compliance professionals can leverage data and insights to help facilities avoid reinventing the wheel when it comes to vendor access, identify potential vendor credentialing compliance gaps and make recommendations on best practices to support the organization’s goals.

To meet compliance obligations, healthcare organizations need to have in place policies, procedures and technology to track vendor representatives that enter their facilities – waiting until “after the fact” is not a strategy for success. By embracing a hybrid automated and specialist-supported credentialing and compliance solution, healthcare systems can be confident that their patients, visitors and staff are secure, and they remain compliant, safeguarding their facility’s accreditation status.

About Sean Eaton
Sean Eaton is Senior Compliance Solutions Specialist at Global Healthcare Exchange (GHX). Prior to this role, Sean led a team of GHX customer success professionals in helping health systems increase software utilization and compliance. Sean holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Human Resource Management from the University of Mississippi.

What You Should Know:

Epic, Nordic, Impact Advisors and The Chartis Group won the 2023 Overall Best in KLAS® awards. Epic was named the top Overall Software Suite for the thirteenth straight year in 2023 Best in KLAS – Software & Services report, released, which reports on the top vendors for 2022. Epic was also named the top Overall Physician Practice Vendor. Epic won thirteen other Best in KLAS awards in various market segments. 

– Impact Advisors tied with Nordic to be a co-winner of the Overall IT Services category. Impact Advisors also excelled in several individual categories, winning Best in KLAS awards for ERP Implementation Leadership, Financial Improvement Consulting, and Security & Privacy Consulting Services.

– Nordic tied with Impact Advisors to be a co-winner of the Overall IT Services category. Nordic is a repeat winner from last year, scoring above 90 in four separate services segments and winning a Best in KLAS award for HIT Core Clinical Implementation Leadership.

2023 Best in KLAS Definitions

Best in KLAS is awarded only in those software and services market segments that have the broadest operational and clinical impact on healthcare organizations. Best in KLAS is based on information obtained from 23,000 evaluations KLAS conducted in 2022. Annually, these interviews represent the opinions of healthcare professionals and clinicians from more than 4,500 healthcare organizations and measure more than 1,000 healthcare technology products and services.

Here is a look at the full list of Best in KLAS winners:

Most Improved Software Product – Veradigm (formerly Allscripts). Veradigm FollowMyHealth customer satisfaction has improved nearly 16% over the past year. Customers report technology improvements, with several stating that the addition of automated post-visit summaries has improved efficiency.

Most Improved Services Solution – KPMG. Client satisfaction with KPMG’s ERP Business Transformation & Implementation Leadership services has increased 24.7% since the 2022 Best in KLAS report. The firm is viewed as being able to handle large, complex ERP implementation projects. Across recent engagements, satisfaction with the firm has been more consistent than in the past, with fewer clients reporting misses from the firm. Additionally, consultant expertise is more highly rated. Current clients feel their project resources had deep experience and were able to provide strategic guidance to help clients overcome the challenges that inherently arise in these difficult implementations.

Best in KLAS: Inpatient Clinical Care

340B Management Systems

PharmaForce 340B

Acute Care EMR: Large ( >400 Beds)

Epic EpicCare Inpatient EMR

Acute Care EMR: Midsize (151–400 Beds)

Epic EpicCare Inpatient EMR

Acute Care EMR: Small (1–150 Beds)

MEDITECH Expanse Acute Care EMR

Automated Dispensing Cabinets

BD Pyxis MedStation ES

Clinical Communications: Acute Care

Epic Secure Chat

Clinical Decision Support: Care Plans & Order Sets

Zynx Health Zynx Order Sets and Care Plans

Clinical Decision Support: Point-of-Care Clinical Reference

Merative (formerly IBM) Micromedex Solutions

Data Archiving

Galen Healthcare VitalCenter Online Archival

Drug Diversion Monitoring

Protenus Diversion Analytics

Infection Control & Monitoring

Wolters Kluwer Sentri7 Infection Prevention  

Integration Engines

Lyniate Corepoint

Workflow Management

BD PharmacyKeeper Verification (Grifols)

Medication Inventory Management

Epic Willow Inventory (Inpatient)

Pharmacy Surveillance

VigiLanz Pharmacy Surveillance

Smart Pumps: EMR-Integrated

ICU Medical Plum 360 (LVP)

Smart Pumps: Traditional

ICU Medical Plum 360 (LVP)

Ambulatory & Post–Acute Care

Ambulatory EMR: Health System Owned

Epic EpicCare Ambulatory EMR

Ambulatory EMR: Independent (>75 Physicians)

Epic EpicCare Ambulatory EMR

Ambulatory EMR: Independent (11–75 Physicians)

athenahealth athenaClinicals

Ambulatory Pediatric EMR

PCC EHR

Ambulatory RCM Services

R1 Physician RCM Services  

Ambulatory Surgery Center Solutions

Surgical Information Systems (SIS) SIS Charts  

Behavioral Health

Credible Behavioral Health Enterprise Software

Home Health: Health System Owned

Epic Dorothy

Home Health: Independent (>200 ADC)

MatrixCare Home Health (Brightree)

Home Health: Independent (1–200 ADC)

MatrixCare Home Health (Brightree)

Hospice: Independent

WellSky Hospice & Palliative

Long-Term Care

PointClickCare

Outpatient Therapy/Rehab

Raintree Systems TherapyRehab Plus

Practice Management: Health System Owned

Epic Resolute/Prelude/Cadence Ambulatory

Practice Management: Independent (>75 Physicians)

athenahealth athenaCollector

Practice Management: Independent (11–75 Physicians)

athenahealth athenaCollector

Small Practice Ambulatory EMR/PM: Independent (2-10 Physicians)

athenahealth EHR/PM

Financial/Revenue Cycle/HIM Business

Decision Support

Strata Decision Technology StrataJazz Decision Support

Claims Management & Clearinghouse

Experian Health ClaimSource

Clinical Documentation Integrity

Iodine Software AwareCDI

Complex Claims Services

Revecore

Computer-Assisted Coding (CAC)

Dolbey Fusion CAC

Computer-Assisted Physician Documentation (CAPD)

Nuance CAPD  

Credentialing

ASM MD-Staff

Data & Analytics Platforms

Innovaccer Data Platform

Data Visualization & Reporting

Tableau

Debt Collection Services

RSi RCM

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

Workday HCM Financial Management and Supply Chain (ERP)

Financial Planning & Analysis

Strata Decision Technology StrataJazz Financial Planning

Healthcare Artificial Intelligence: Data Science Solutions

ClosedLoop Healthcare’s Data Science Platform

Healthcare Safety, Risk & Compliance Management

Performance Health Partners Safety, Risk, and Compliance Solutions

Insurance Discovery

FinThrive Insurance Discover

Patient Access

AccuReg Patient Access

Patient Accounting & Patient Management: Large (>400 Beds)

Epic Resolute Hospital Billing

Patient Financial Engagement

Waystar Patient Financial Experience

Patient Financing Services

CarePayment CarePayment Patient Financing

Patient Flow

Epic Grand Central Patient Flow (full suite)  

Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS)

Securitas Healthcare (formerly STANLEY Healthcare) MobileView (Hardware & Software)  

Revenue Cycle: Chargemaster Management

The Craneware Group Chargemaster Toolkit

Revenue Cycle: Contract Management

Experian Health Contract Management & Analysis

Robotic Process Automation

Cloudmed (an R1 Company) Cloudmed Automation

Scheduling: Nurse & Staff

QGenda Nurse & Staff Scheduling

Scheduling: Physician

QGenda Shift Admin Scheduling

Speech Recognition: Front-End

EMR Nuance Dragon Medical One

Talent Management

Workday Human Capital Management  

Time & Attendance

symplr Time and Attendance (formerly API Healthcare)

Value-Based Care

Digital Rounding Huron Rounding

EMR-Centric Virtual Care Platforms

Elation Health: Elation Telehealth

Interactive Patient Systems

pCare

Patient Communications

CipherHealth CipherOutreach

Patient-Driven Care Management

Wolters Kluwer Emmi

Patient Experience Improvement

NRC Health  

Patient Portals

Epic MyChart

Population Health Management

Azara Healthcare DRVS

Remote Patient Monitoring Health Recovery Solutions

HRS Remote Patient Monitoring Platform

Social Determinants of Health

Networks findhelp (Aunt Bertha)

Video Conferencing Platforms

Doximity Dialer

Virtual Care Platforms (Non-EMR)

Caregility Cloud

Security & Privacy

Access Management

Duo Trusted Access (Mostly MFA and EPCS)

Healthcare IoT Security

Medigate by Claroty Medigate IoMT Solutions  

Identity Management

Imprivata IAM Suite

Patient Privacy Monitoring

Protenus Patient Privacy Monitoring

Security & Privacy Consulting Services

Impact Advisors

Security & Privacy Managed Services

Fortified Health Security

Application Hosting

Epic

Clinical Optimization

Galen Healthcare

Denials Management Services

Cloudmed (an R1 Company)  

Digital Transformation Consulting

Chartis

Eligibility Enrollment Services

Change Healthcare Eligibility and Enrollment Advocate

ERP Business Transformation & Implementation Leadership

Huron

ERP Implementation Leadership

Impact Advisors  

Extended Business Office

Guidehouse  

Financial Improvement Consulting

Impact Advisors

Go-Live Support

Medasource

HIT Advisory Services

Guidehouse

HIT Core Clinical Implementation Leadership

Nordic

HIT Staffing

iMethods

Managed IT Services

Pivot Point Consulting, a Vaco Company

Outsourced Coding

Oxford Global Resources  

Physician Advisory Services

XSOLIS

Release of Information

Sharecare  

Revenue Cycle Optimization

Chi-Matic

Revenue Cycle Outsourcing

Guidehouse

Strategy, Growth & Consolidation Consulting

Guidehouse

Technical Services

Prominence

Transcription Services

AQuity Solutions

Underpayment Recovery Services

Revecore

Value-Based Care Consulting

PINC AI (formerly Premier)

Value-Based Care Managed Services

Arcadia

Virtual Scribing Services

AQuity Solutions Real-Time Virtual Scribes

Imaging Systems Cardiology

Merative (formerly IBM) Merge Cardio

Cardiology Hemodynamics

Merative (formerly IBM) Merge Hemo

Image Exchange

Nuance PowerShare  

Oncology: Medical

 Epic Beacon

Oncology: Radiation

Varian (A Siemens Healthineers Company) ARIA

PACS: Large (>300K Studies)

Sectra PACS

PACS: Small (≤300K Studies)

Sectra PACS

Speech Recognition: Front-End Imaging

3M MModal Fluency for Imaging

Universal Viewer (Imaging)

Visage Imaging Visage 7

Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA)

Fujifilm Synapse VNA (TeraMedica)  

Payer Solutions Care Management Solutions (Payer)

ZeOmega Jiva

Claims & Administration Platforms (Payer)

HealthEdge HealthRules Payer

CMS Payer Interoperability

Edifecs XEngine Server For FHIR

Employer-Sponsored Healthcare Services

 Marathon Health

IT Consulting Services (Payer)

EMIDS

Quality Analytics (Payer)

MedInsight Quality Analytics

Risk Adjustment

Vatica Health Risk Adjustment and Quality of Care Solution

What You Should Know:

– Healthcare profit pools are expected to grow 4 percent annually resulting from $654 billion in 2021 to $790 billion in 2026, according to a new McKinsey report.

– The report reveals inflation is not transitory and the economic outlook has meaningfully darkened due to a healthcare worker shortage and endemic COVID-19.  

What to expect in US healthcare in 2023 and beyond

The US healthcare industry faces demanding conditions in 2023, including recessionary pressure, continuing high inflation rates, labor shortages, and endemic COVID-19. But players are not standing still.

Key findings from the report are as follows:

1. Healthcare services and technology is expected to be the fastest growing sector in healthcare at 10 percent annual growth between 2021-2026 (potentially landing at $81 billion by 2026).  On the other hand, the outlook for some segments has worsened compared with the previous analyses, including general acute care and post-acute care within providers and Medicaid within payers.

2. The Government segment’s profit pools are projected to land nearly 50 percent greater than the Commercial group segment by 2026 ($33 billion compared with $21 billion). In July 2022, it was estimated that  2021 payer profit pools to be $40 billion, however, actual 2021 profit pools were $5 billion higher Higher Medicaid EBITDA margins due to the extended public health emergency accounted for the majority of the increase, although it was partially offset by lower-than-expected commercial margins with the return of deferred care.

3. Increased labor costs and administrative expenses are expected to contribute to reduced earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization by about 60 basis points in 2022 and 2023 combined. Previously, in July 2022, it was estimated that provider profit pools would grow at a 7 percent CAGR from 2021 to 2025. The current forecast is that of a 3 percent CAGR from 2021 to 2026 in updated and expanded estimates, with the decline primarily due to increased costs owing to high inflation and labor shortages.

4. Payer profit pools are expected to grow at 11 percent annually reaching $75 billion in 2026. Growth in 2021 resulted from making up for care deferred from the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as additional healthcare demand attributable to COVID-19. Provider profit pools faced substantial pressure in 2022 and are likely to continue to do so in 2023 as a result of inflation and increased labor costs.    

5. Payer profit pools are likely to see slower than normal growth between 2022-23 due to inflationary pressure and provider reimbursement rate increases.  

6. Provider profit pools are also expected to see slower growth annually than previously predicted (3 percent growth annually from 2021-26, compared to the 7 percent figure previously predicted).  Three factors account for the anticipated faster growth in HST. First, analysts expect higher demand from payers and providers to improve efficiency and address labor challenges. Second, payers and providers are likely to be willing to absorb vendor price increases where there is clear value. Third, experts expect HST companies to make operational changes that will improve efficiency, including through the use of technology and automation across services.

7. Increased labor costs and administrative expenses are expected to contribute to reduced earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization by about 60 basis points in 2022 and 2023 combined.

Vijay Kedar, Co-Founder and CEO at Tomorrow Health

Health systems will realize their challenges are not transitory but systemic: This year saw health systems facing a myriad of compounding threats – from historic inflation exacerbating their cost structures, front-line clinician burnout driving widespread labor shortages, and increased capacity issues that left patients in hospital facilities one full day longer than in the prior year. As the financial markets turned south, many institutions saw their investment income stagnate, reducing the support it historically provided to hospitals’ thin operating margins. Worst of all, the predicted rebound in procedure volumes as the pandemic waned never materialized. While inflation will stabilize, many of these challenges will persist as health systems enter a new normal where substantial inpatient procedure volumes have shifted to outpatient, ambulatory, and home-based settings, but hospitals’ fixed costs remain high. Recognition of this will prompt continued consolidation and accelerate health system bankruptcies, in which rural markets will unfortunately likely be hit hardest.

Mudit Garg, CEO and Co-founder of Qventus

Growing surgical revenue will continue to be a top priority for health systems into 2023. But growing that revenue will require a new approach to the perennial challenges around patient access and patient flow in perioperative and inpatient settings. We’ll increasingly see a ‘digital divide’ in service areas, where hospitals using automation will perform much better than those that continue to rely on manual processes.

Michael Meucci, CEO of Arcadia

While some have called 2022 an ‘unprecedented year’ for healthcare, the reality is that many of the pressures that challenge health systems’ budgets and margins will continue into 2023 and beyond. To respond to financial and operational challenges, more organizations are looking to smart automation to help drive efficiency in providing high-quality, coordinated, cost-effective care. For the healthcare system overall, this represents an opportunity to deliver on the promise of automation in pragmatic ways to lessen the administrative burdens for care-continuum contributors – as well as an opportunity for individual health systems and health plans to collaborate with partners to advance the adoption of novel technology in and out of the care setting.

Florian Otto, CEO at Cedar

Providers Will Fight Revenue Challenges With Admin Efficiencies: Revenue challenges will persist in 2023 for healthcare providers. As part of that, the biggest obstacle providers will continue to face is navigating labor issues (sustained shortages and increasingly high costs). Due to these challenges – and to help combat them – providers will need to re-evaluate their administrative solutions for opportunities to automate and create efficiency. Healthcare consumers experience a lot of friction along their healthcare journeys, including calling (and waiting on hold) to make appointments, repetitive pre-registration paperwork, and clunky post-visit check-outs. By contrast, no one from an airline is calling you to walk through availability when you book a plane ticket – technology helps you navigate this journey very effectively on your own. With better administrative technology, providers can empower consumers to better engage with their digital health journeys, while also reducing operational costs and administrative labor inefficiencies.

Kuldeep Singh Rajput, CEO and Founder of Biofourmis

Expect health systems and hospitals to implement staffing design and burnout mitigation strategies in 2023 to ensure the time and expertise of employed clinicians are put to the best use while also delivering the highest-quality care to patients at home in hospital-level acute-care or chronic condition management programs. The strategies will involve selecting highly qualified and specialized clinical partners to manage much of the monitoring, outreach, technical support, care coordination, logistics and other time-intensive, but critical activities for home-based patients. Organizations will further reduce staff burden in 2023 by taking advantage of leading artificial intelligence and machine-learning-powered data analytics technologies that can provide highly personalized and predictive insight into patient trajectories and guideline-concordant care. This enables employed clinicians to practice at the top of their license, utilizing their years of education, training and experience to directly care for patients and make safe and effective data-driven decisions without the drudgery of data and software management.

Angie Franks, CEO of ABOUT Healthcare Inc.

In the post-pandemic era, the demand for care will continue to increase, placing an unprecedented strain on medical resources and exposing the implications of the independent, transactional care delivery model. As technology innovation continues to drive digital transformation, providers will need to implement controls that proactively guide patients to the optimal care setting rather than just dealing with them when they arrive at a facility. When the boundaries to care are no longer limited to the hospital setting, providers can ensure prompt access to care at every stage of the patient journey thus promoting optimal patient outcomes, which is the primary objective.

Adam McMullin, CEO of AvaSure

The nursing shortage and persistent labor competition have become a long-term systemic problem, creating immense challenges for hospitals surmounting significant financial pressure. In order to achieve the desired levels of quality improvement and labor cost savings, healthcare systems must use new care models that leverage technology and virtual care in all acute care settings. Virtual care elevates bedside care, allowing our valued clinicians to function at the top of their licenses.

Dr. Oleg Bess, cofounder and CEO of 4medica

Patient safety and quality of care will continue to be impacted by the quality of data available to clinicians for diagnosing and treating patients. As provider organizations struggle to accurately identify patients and match them to their records, expect to see more hospitals, health systems and labs turn to intelligent technologies to reduce patient duplications and other data-quality problems. 

Eric Lisle, President and CEO at Southeast Primary Care Partners

In 2023, I anticipate continued pressure on healthcare leadership teams to find and recruit top talent. Organizations will have to look at their human resource strategies in a competitive labor market and address burnout within the industry. As the need for healthcare grows nationwide, so should the need to not only recruit, but support, employees in healthcare with the resources needed to succeed. This pressure will drive companies to rethink current recruitment strategies to focus on the health and longevity of their team, and consequentially, the patients they serve.

Expect additional consolidation in the payor space. Massive changes at some of the most well-known insurance companies will shift to a service-providing model. Look to Optum and Humana to watch this change in real-time.  I anticipate that within 10 years, the current insurance market will no longer exist. Instead, providers, employers, and technology partners will work in tandem to offer unique healthcare options that are better tailored for unique audiences.

The ongoing health equity trend will continue with a renewed focus on rural markets. Current gaps in care delivery, peripheral services, and specialty medicine can be filled by leveraging technology and resources to support local providers to deliver care in the communities they know best.

Andrew Mellin, VP, Chief Medical Information Officer at Surescripts

Health systems facing ever-greater economic uncertainty: Economic uncertainty will worsen for health systems next year with provider burnout, staff shortages, rising inflation, and cyber security threats and attacks driving costs higher than ever before. Health systems may be forced to make hard choices like cutting or limiting services that could adversely impact patient access to care.

But technology is available today that reduces costly inefficiencies and the administrative burdens contributing to provider burnout and extra costs. When providers have access to patient health intelligence at the point of care, they can make better-informed decisions and spend less time on phone calls and faxes that take away from patient care.

Vince King, Chief Commercial Officer at TailorMed 

The future of affordability – driving access at scale across stakeholders: Healthcare affordability has long been a challenge solved one patient at a time. In 2023 and beyond, healthcare has the opportunity to harness available technology, data, and analytics to proactively examine patient populations and drive affordability at scale. Breaking down silos across industries – providers, health systems, pharmacies, and life science companies – will be key in drastically changing the industry’s approach. 

Following the pandemic, the industry is stretched more than ever before – clinical burnout, effects of the Great Resignation, and lack of career satisfaction are plaguing the industry. Technology workflows are key in driving efficiencies – taking additional administrative burden off healthcare workers – all while helping patients.

Take pharmacy staff, for example. For years, pharmacists and pharmacy technicians have played a critical role in identifying medication financial assistance. However, today, when pharmacy teams are on the front lines delivering clinical care and critical vaccines, technology has the power to transform a manual, reactive financial navigation process into a proactive, automated one. . Next year, the industry will see healthcare entities from life sciences to provider practices implementing technology workflows to proactively address affordability in a holistic, comprehensive way. We all must do our part in helping as many patients as possible afford care – because we can and we should.

Amanda L. Bury, MS, Chief Commercial Officer at Infermedica

A greater movement to care outside the four-walls of a hospital. The movement to care inside your home through devices, telehealth and basic homecare. I think we are undervaluing the care patients can receive for basic low acuity cases inside their home. More and more medical devices are integrated with EHRs and technology stacks making it easier for patients to share data with their clinicians continually.

Bob Booth, MD, Chief Care Officer of TimelyMD

The complete integration of medical and behavioral care will become a high priority for healthcare organizations in the coming months. Many health issues – including fatigue, headaches and stomach pains – may actually be the physical manifestations of stress, anxiety or other mental health issues. Efforts to address one issue typically have a positive impact on the other since mental health and physical well-being are intertwined.

Dr. Nic Orsi, Chief Pathologist at 4D Path, Newton, Massachusetts, USA, and Clinician Scientist in Histopathology, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

Getting the best treatment, especially when it comes to cancer, starts with getting the right diagnosis and having a thorough understanding of the exact nature of a patient’s specific disease. In 2022 and beyond, we expect precision diagnostics technology to transform how cancer diagnosis and, ultimately, treatment is approached, putting patients on an accelerated course to more tailored treatment and improved treatment outcome. By accelerating complete, actionable and objective insight, technology innovators are ushering in the future of medicine. It is a future in which precision diagnostics and tailored prognostication will continue to revolutionize both cancer diagnosis and management based on a rapprochement between histopathology and oncology, ultimately streamlining the cancer care pathway and benefiting patients worldwide.

Vikram Savkar, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Medicine Segment of Health Learning, Research & Practice at Wolters Kluwer

In the wake of the pandemic hospitals face ever more pressure to improve care quality, which influences every strategic goal in the shift to value-based care, including financial performance. This renewed focus on quality improvement efforts across broad health systems has shed light on the fact that evidence-based practice (EBP) is difficult to execute efficiently and consistently. In 2023, hospitals and health systems will seek out AI-powered solutions capable of standardizing and accelerating the EBP research process so that continual clinical improvement becomes a core element in hospitals’ culture.

Alan Tam, VP of Marketing, Actium Health

Healthcare marketers are going to continue to face challenges throughout the next 12 months, with economic uncertainty – along with many factors – impacting consumer behavior. Those challenges will come into play as marketers implement strategies aimed at their areas of focus, including outpatient volume growth, patient engagement and outreach, driving appointment bookings and measuring the impact of their programs and campaigns. Marketers looking to do all of those things and demonstrate a return on investment – which will be critical for the foreseeable future – must start thinking about new strategies and solutions that improve on leveraging the data they have to connect with healthcare consumers.

With consumer behavior likely to change along with the economy, healthcare marketers are going to have to focus on getting the right information to the right individual at the right time. Engagement for engagement sake is going to be left in 2022. Moving forward, health systems will have to connect consumers to the services and resources they need, or are at risk of needing.

To achieve that, silos will come down, and departments across the health system – like marketing, medical groups, and service lines – will need to collaborate to ensure consumers receive the information and services most valuable to them, while also driving revenue to the right areas of the business.

In 2023, timely, personal, and intelligent communications and engagement will be what health systems and marketers strive for, and what healthcare consumers demand.   

Grace Nam, Strategic Solutions Manager at Laserfiche

Embracing digital workflows and modernization will be transformational for healthcare systems in 2023. Technology will improve and reform workforce structures to eliminate staff burden and burnout and create new opportunities for upskilling. Career growth opportunities and ease of use for employees will be critical to providing quality support to patients. Additionally, secure electronic documentation tools will be used to store key data, such as around a patient’s visits and medical history, and create clear treatment plans and monitor progress. This will, for example, enable the interflow and exchange of patients’ clinical lab results between clinical workforce and medical staff.  

What You Should Know:

– As healthcare organizations have come out of the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, EMR purchase decisions in Asia have ramped up. In Oceania, most public hospitals have an EMR in place, but purchase energy remains high since many public and private provider organizations are planning large-scale purchases of go-forward EMRs.

– This report—KLAS’ first focused exclusively on Asia and Oceania—highlights (1) market share and vendor energy in recent EMR purchase decisions and (2) vendor performance in each region based on client feedback and experience.

Understanding and Analyzing The State of EMRs in Asia/Oceania

Each year, KLAS interviews thousands of healthcare professionals about the IT solutions and services their organizations use. For this report, interviews were conducted over the last 12 months using KLAS’ standard quantitative evaluation for healthcare software, which is composed of 16 numeric ratings questions and 4 yes/no questions, all weighted equally. Combined, the ratings for these questions make up the overall performance score, which is measured on a 100-point scale. The questions are organized into six customer experience pillars—culture, loyalty, operations, product, relationship, and value.

The key insights obtained from the report are listed and explained as follows:

IQVIA Growing Fast in Asia, with Improved Support & Delivery in South and Southeast Asia:

IQVIA has one of the broadest market footprints in Asia. Customers span six countries in Southeast Asia and are also found in India and Sri Lanka. The customer base for IQVIA’s go-forward Arcus Air platform (acquired from Incarnus Technologies in 2019) has more than tripled in the last five years, with 19 organizations selecting it. The hosted cloud version has been adopted by customers in Cambodia, India, and Thailand. Support has improved since the acquisition, even through the pandemic. Clients describe strong partnership from IQVIA and say their representatives know the customer organization well and respond quickly. A recent product upgrade has led to some reports of system slowness, hurting client satisfaction slightly.

ezCaretech a Strong Performer in South Korea, Slow to Expand to Other Countries

ezCaretech has a significant presence in South Korea, where they are headquartered and where they have steadily grown in the last five years. They have the highest overall score of measured vendors in Asia, and clients—especially large academic hospitals, where the solution is widely used—report good development of BESTCare. Customers describe BESTCare as a high-quality solution with robust functionality and solid integration. Some want ezCaretech to provide faster development and better training. Recent employee turnover has resulted in slower responsiveness. ezCaretech’s new offering, EDGE&NEXT, is a smaller, cloud-based solution that has been adopted by some smaller hospitals in South Korea. ezCaretech was also selected by a hospital in Japan, their first Asia client outside South Korea.

InterSystems Delivers Solid Performance to Broad Customer Base:

InterSystems has clients (mostly private hospital groups) across five different Asian countries and has the largest market presence in the region among the multiregional vendors KLAS monitors. The highly configurable TrakCare product generally meets expectations and is working well for clients in multiple countries. Respondents describe good relationships with InterSystems’ executives, strong support, and smooth implementations. Customers would like to see more proactive outreach from InterSystems in terms of adapting to local requirements, rather than reacting when clients initiate conversations. Clients also want more proactive communication about available training resources and newly released features; on a related note, clients feel usability for tools like CPOE could be improved.

Oracle Health (Cerner) Has the Largest Existing Market Share in Oceania, Lowest Customer Satisfaction:

Oracle Health, who acquired Cerner in June 2022, currently has the largest presence of any EMR vendor in Oceania, with several large, longstanding government contracts, including in New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria. Over 200 hospitals have digitized various clinician and departmental workflows through the use of Oracle Health. However, in November 2022, New South Wales Health announced their selection of Epic for their Single Digital Patient Record program. In terms of the Oracle Health client experience, customers are increasingly frustrated, and customer satisfaction in the region is currently at the lowest point KLAS has measured. Respondents note that significant turnover has hurt support and customer relationships, and clients say they are left with inexperienced personnel and poor problem resolution. Hospitals that have retained the same vendor representatives report higher satisfaction and smoother experiences. The product itself generally meets customers’ needs and is a strength for Oracle Health. However, the slower pace of development has led to unmet promises for specific functionality. Customers are divided on their outlook following the acquisition: some are hopeful for technology improvements, while others are less optimistic and expect turnover issues to continue.

Epic (Limited Data) Stands Out for Relationships in Australia:

At the time this research concluded, four organizations were live with Epic in Oceania (all in Melbourne, Australia), and all have achieved HIMSS Level 6; a fifth customer went live in late 2022. The three interviewed Epic clients report consistently high satisfaction, highlighting Epic’s strong partnership through the implementation and after go-live. Respondents appreciate Epic’s proactivity and strategic engagement when it comes to broad change management. Customers do feel training and product usability could improve.

Renewed Customer Focus from InterSystems & Telstra Have Led to Improvements:

Following some challenges in Oceania, InterSystems restructured their team prior to the pandemic to better support the Australian market. Those efforts have helped some struggling clients make improvements and successfully go live. Today, customers remain somewhat dissatisfied with InterSystems: several upgrades (from heavily customized environments to InterSystems’ country- specific editions) had significant delays and challenges that were exacerbated by stretched resources and insufficient training. Going forward, most clients plan to stick with InterSystems, feeling that things will continue to improve. They cite enhancements like a long- awaited interface revamp (part of a new upgrade) aimed at better mobile device support.

KLAS does not have historical performance data on Telstra Health, but recently interviewed customers consistently note that while they struggled during implementation and in the early stages of using the product (five or more years ago), the vendor has recently made significant improvements to product stability and the user interface. Customers can deploy the solution in most departments and do most documentation electronically, though some still use paper forms or a third party for ePrescribing. Respondents feel Telstra Health has recommitted themselves to focusing on customer relationships and proactive service. Customers want Telstra to continue making positive strides in areas like integration and development.

The report also had combined insights regarding Altera Digital Health for Asia and Oceania:

Altera Digital Health (formerly Allscripts) has a few clients using Sunrise Acute Care in Asia and Oceania, but KLAS was unable to interview enough unique clients for the vendor to be rated in the individual regions; this report shares their aggregate performance across both regions. Altera is used by a large number of hospitals in South Australia and by a few clients in Singapore and Guam; one organization in the Philippines is implementing.

Customer satisfaction with the solution is at its lowest level since KLAS started measuring it in 2015. Most customers plan to stay because of the effort required to get the solution to its current state, but few would buy it again. Clients’ chief complaints are slow development, inexperienced staff, poor relationships, and unkept promises. It is too soon to tell the impact of the Harris Healthcare acquisition.

What You Should Know:

– Health systems are increasingly working to get the most out of their IT investments. Focusing on a strong implementation can have a huge impact. Analysis of KLAS data gathered from 2018–2022 suggests that the quality of implementations may be more important than the technology selected.

– The data primarily focuses on solutions that require complex, large-scale implementations (e.g., acute care EMRs, ERP solutions, patient accounting systems, and PACS solutions). This study is part of KLAS ’ new Landmark Insights initiative—aimed at helping health systems currently implementing an HIT solution determine whether their project is on track for success.

Understanding How HIT Vendors and Customers Can Lay a Foundation For Success

Each year, KLAS interviews thousands of healthcare professionals about the IT solutions and services their organizations use. KLAS ’ standard quantitative evaluation for healthcare software is composed of 16 numeric ratings questions and 4 yes/no questions, all weighted equally. Combined, the ratings for these questions make up the overall performance score, which is measured on a 100-point scale. The questions are organized into six customer experience pillars—culture, loyalty, operations, product, relationship, and value. This report draws on KLAS ’ standard data across a broad set of IT solutions to explain industry-wide trends around implementations and the subsequent customer experience.

Key insights and trends are listed and explained as follows:

1. High-Quality Implementation Is One of the Strongest Predictors of Market-Leading Performance: In 2022, 81% of Best in KLAS winners were also the highest rated in their market segment for quality of implementation; in market segments that require complex, enterprise-scale deployments, that number was 100%. This highlights the effects of a strong implementation on all other customer experience factors. Additionally, interviewed customers are unlikely to report high satisfaction with outcomes without an implementation rating of at least 7 out of 9. On the flip side, 85% of customers satisfied with outcomes report a good implementation.

2. Many Implementations Aren’t Making the Grade, and Success after a Poor Implementation Is Rare: 49% of interviewed individuals report that their implementation needed improvement (i.e., they rated its quality 7 or below on a 1–9 scale). Improving the customer experience overall is difficult after a poor initial implementation—among organizations that start out with a poor implementation and low satisfaction, 76% continue to struggle years after the implementation. This echoes a key finding from KLAS ’ Arch Collaborative (an initiative that directly measures end users ’ EMR experience): poor initial training can continue to negatively impact end users for up to six years.

3. Keys to a Successful Implementation—Best Practices for Vendors and Healthcare Organizations: Both HIT vendors and healthcare organizations have a role to play in driving successful IT implementations. One CIO described the need for collaboration between all parties: “An implementation is owned by all the groups involved. Projects are about ownership, attention, and commitment. Every leader needs to be at the table with a full understanding of the options. . . . We need to communicate in a clear and concise fashion. The client needs to truly understand what they are getting themselves into. The vendors need to be honest and forthright with their clients. We are paying a lot of money to get the system implemented correctly.”

Every day, hospital staff do the best they can to navigate the daily chaos of bed management by making educated guesses as to what is going to happen over the course of the day. Relying on team huddles throughout the day, staff pore over Excel or paper spreadsheets to predict how many beds will open up and when. They try to estimate demand for those beds by the time of day, unsure when to deploy “surge capacity.” On some days, this method works out well. However, more often than not, the staff’s best efforts result in long patient waits, unwanted staff overtime, and ultimately lower access to care. 

The problem with traditional bed management is that the common approach of using spreadsheets to get a periodic read of patient flow, then trying to unlock capacity by discharging patients faster, simply does not work. It takes sophisticated algorithms and real-time predictive and prescriptive analytics to shape demand, successfully match bed supply, place the right patient in the right bed at the right time, and identify and address discharge barriers. 

The ROI of Improving Patient Flow 

Inpatient beds are a substantial economic investment — a single bed can be worth $10,000. Keeping a steady flow of patients into and out of beds is a tricky yet vitally important element of the overall management and efficiency of a hospital. It’s also core to providing a positive patient experience. 

Historically, health systems have directed extensive resources to improve patient flow and reducing the length of stay. Avoidable days, or the number of days a patient remains as an inpatient even though he/she/they are medically ready for discharge, can cost a hospital thousands of dollars each month. Avoidable days generally occur because of an avoidable delay, such as not securing necessary durable medical equipment (DME) for a patient post-discharge or not securing a room at a post-acute care facility (i.e. skilled-nursing facility (SNF) or rehab) for the patient to enter once he/she/they are no longer an inpatient. Addressing these barriers as early as possible in the patient stay, so the patient can be discharged to the right next step of their care journey at the right time, is critical to avoiding lengthy and costly delays and turning over new beds.

If hospitals invest in the right easy-to-use tools, backed by a predictive and prescriptive analytics engine combined with the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP), they can proactively identify and address discharge barriers earlier, streamline patient flow, and ultimately improve patient outcomes and the bottom line. Here are four opportunities to improve bed management with AI and NLP-based analytics: 

1) Using sophisticated demand-supply models to assign patient beds

The best way to optimally place patients is to accurately predict and match supply and demand – on a unit-by-unit, minute-by-minute, day-by-day level – every day. Similar to how apps like Waze take baseline predictions from the speed of traffic for each section of the road for each minute of each day of the week, solutions are now available that model current and future bed availability in each unit. Supply and demand must be approached in different, yet compatible, ways. 

Supply: Model the availability and timing of beds that will become available in each unit. By using historical data to mathematically create a “fingerprint” (a model for each unit that predicts the likely number of patients that will be discharged), hospital staff can make concrete placement decisions about individual patients. Since the predictions are augmented by real-time feeds, these decisions will be more accurate and less speculative. 

Demand: Similar to the supply side, create specifically tailored models for “upcoming demand signals” at any time of the day for each element of demand. These elements can include various factors, such as incoming volumes from surgical and emergency departments, as well as external transfers. Models can be updated by real-time feeds that capture any delays or cancellations of surgeries to ensure updated accuracy.

Side-by-side supply and demand models can then be elevated to patient-placement leaders, giving them visibility into upcoming demand and supply for beds. This leads to dramatically better outcomes than a system purely based on reaction. 

2) Make data-driven internal transfer decisions

Internal bed transfer requests are often viewed as an added burden, pushed to the side to be executed only when convenient. However, transfers can actually serve as a strategic lever since they can free up a bed that will be needed in the near future. By utilizing the predictive modeling tool described above, plus moving the right patients to appropriate open beds, placement teams can open up the right slots to meet the expected demand for high-value beds.

3) Forecast demand with surgical smoothing 

On a given day, 20-25% of bed demand is the flow of patients from the OR into inpatient beds. This often results in spikes in the inpatient census. Surprisingly, this flow is in fact more “controllable” than the census contribution from the emergency department, as optimizing the elective surgery schedule with respect to recovery time can yield a flatter inpatient census. The practice of “surgical smoothing” can be done by forecasting the volume and case mix of surgeries, using AI-based tools to develop templates for scheduling. 

4) Use predictive discharge planning to focus case teams and social services

The most common discharge delays occur towards the end of a patient’s stay – typically surrounding insurance, transportation, follow-up outpatient or home care, or if necessary, availability at skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) or extended care facilities. This last discharge barrier has become especially challenging in recent years, as SNFs are suffering from severe post-pandemic operational and staffing constraints.

Many discharge delays can be avoided if case managers were alerted to the problem earlier in the patient’s stay. Historical data regarding avoidable discharge delays can be collected, and a machine-learning model can be used to identify key case attributes that indicate possible discharge delays early on. The most powerful solution also uses NLP, which makes this information actionable to all care team members and unit staff so they can proactively remove barriers and optimize patient flow. This helps reduce costly avoidable days and provides patients with a smoother care journey. 

Each of these pillars of bed management is critical when it comes to improving processes and asset utilization. While each health system will have different criteria and contributing factors for proper bed management and patient outcomes, and while new tools require learning and patience, the investment is definitely worthwhile.

About Sanjeev Agrawal

Sanjeev serves as the President and Chief Operating Officer for LeanTaaS, the leading AI / ML analytics company in healthcare operations. LeanTaaS’s predictive analytics software powers over 130 health systems and 500 hospitals to improve access and lower costs.

Sanjeev is also the co-author of the book “Better Healthcare Through Math”. Before LeanTaaS, Sanjeev was Google’s first Head of Product Marketing and led three successful startups – CEO at Aloqa (acquired by Motorola), VP of Products & Marketing at TellMe Networks (acquired by Microsoft) and Founder & CEO at Collegefeed (acquired by AfterCollege).

As the healthcare industry continues to embrace new technologies, remote patient monitoring (RPM) is becoming established as a way to help chronic patients remain in their homes with health supervision to prevent unnecessary hospital admissions and visits to the emergency department, urgent care facility, or physician’s office.  

RPM has been known for its ability to monitor a patient’s vital signs in near real-time and provide quantitative data to their care team over time. Having patients take and transmit vital sign measurements like blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen levels, temperature, weight, and blood sugar frequently to an RPM platform provides nurses and physicians with this important information remotely, helping inform their clinical decision-making about a patient’s care.

Healthcare professionals can also spot patterns over time; for example, increases or decreases in weight or blood pressure daily might signify a decline that could lead to a hospital stay.

But quantitative data is just one of the inputs to RPM systems. Best-in-class solutions incorporate clinical pathways that ask symptom and well-being questions that elicit qualitative data (also known as non-numerical data) as part of a patient’s daily RPM usage, adding to the quantitative data to create a more comprehensive picture of the patient’s current health status. These might be questions based on the quantitative data they see; for example, if their blood pressure is registering as high, they might ask:

∙ “Are you experiencing any headaches today?”

∙ “On a scale of 1-10, how bad is your pain?”

∙ “Have you had any bloody noses?”

∙ “Have you had any problems with your vision?”

∙ “Have you seen any blood in your urine?”

If warranted, the conversation can be elevated to a video call so that the nurse or healthcare provider can use visual data (also known as observable data), such as a live video, to affirm or refute patient distress suggested by electronically transmitted data. This additional data can help spot inconsistencies in how the RPM equipment is being used or help detect that a patient is suffering from symptoms that traditional telehealth solutions can’t capture, such as a cough, clammy hands, an unusual pallor to the skin, fatigue, confusion, dizziness or other symptoms.

The role of cellular

RPM solutions usually connect to the internet via Wi-Fi or cellular. Cellular is emerging as the connectivity method of choice because of its reliability. Some of the benefits of using cellular connectivity for RPM solutions include:

∙       Ubiquity: People understand how cellular works. Of patients aged 65 and older, 91 percent own a cellphone, and of those, 53 percent own a smartphone, according to Pew Research Group.

∙       Simplicity of set-up: A complicated configuration is not required for many RPM devices. While some solutions providers retrofit tablets, others have purpose-built RPM solutions that simply need to be turned on.

∙       Consistent near-real-time data sets: Gathering data sets developed in near real-time and over time allows healthcare providers to see trends and take preventative action. Cellular is a stronger fit for this type of application.

∙       Upgrade path to 5G, when available: Some vendors are building 5G capabilities into their devices today to prepare for its arrival. RPM cellular solutions have a clear upgrade path to 5 G’s high-bandwidth connectivity.

∙       The use of open standards and existing infrastructure. Cellular is well-proven, and RPM can use existing infrastructure as the underlying medium to connect patients and their healthcare providers and help patients take a more significant role in their healthcare.

∙       The ability to cover hundreds of devices simultaneously. Cellular macrocells can cover a wide area, ensuring connectivity is always available for the patient

RPM solutions combine all these data types to be synthesized by a trained monitoring clinician to transform clinical care for chronic patients from episodic to preventative. Access to a complete data set over a robust cellular network greatly enhances nurses, physicians, and other healthcare providers’ ability to intervene early and prevent acute episodes.

About Tina Null

Tina Null, MSN, RN joined the Anelto executive team as Chief Clinical Officer. She comes to us with decades of healthcare leadership experience that ranges from acute care to home care. She has led Clinical operations as well as Health Information Management and Patient Access operations in two large integrated health systems in the central Ohio area. In addition to her leadership roles, Tina has served healthcare as a Six Sigma Black Belt project manager, a Change Management Practitioner, and most recently a clinical consultant in the RPM space at Vivify Health. She is a graduate of The Ohio State University where she obtained her Bachelor’s in Nursing and Capital University where she received her Master’s in Nursing Administration.