The Pennant Group Inc., a holding firm for greater than 120 dwelling well being and hospice companies in addition to greater than 50 senior dwelling communities, has developed tech interoperability partnerships with acute-care well being methods corresponding to Scripps Well being, John Muir Well being and Hartford Healthcare. Pennant CIO Bryant Saxon lately spoke with Healthcare Innovation about creating integrations between acute and residential well being and hospice methods to drive continuity of care.
Healthcare Innovation: Do you attempt to unify the know-how platform throughout all your own home well being and hospice companies or are they utilizing a whole lot of totally different options at each?
Saxon: It is a mixture of each. We’re at all times striving towards standardization, however we additionally delight ourselves on having petri dishes the place we discover totally different applied sciences. A novel a part of our working mannequin is tied to our tradition of native decision-making, so I really feel prefer it’s my job in a centralized innovation crew to maintain the petri dishes going, determine those which are working, and implement them broadly.
HCI: I used to be that you simply developed partnerships with Scripps, John Muir and Hartford Healthcare. I additionally perceive you’re employed intently together with your essential well being IT vendor Homecare Homebase on these. May you discuss a bit of bit about how these partnerships got here collectively, and why interoperability between methods is essential to creating these work?
Saxon: With a well being system, you will have the best alternative to ship high-quality care in the event you can coordinate every a part of affected person motion throughout the care continuum by way of info sharing. The place Homecare Homebase and Pennant are available is that oftentimes well being methods are utilizing a system that’s sub-optimal for a selected service line. Perhaps it is nice for the bigger hospital system, however perhaps not for post-acute care or dwelling care. So we are available and implement specialised options to handle all of those particular gaps that may get created. The most important one is doctor order signing. Within the native EMR that the hospital system is utilizing, we permit them to signal orders which are generated from HomeCare Homebase.
We carry worth to the hospital system additionally by alerting them of correct billing alternatives the place they’re offering care coordination. Sufferers are utilizing issues like Epic MyChart as a single software for seeing their chart, so we be certain they will see different EMR medical document information inside My Chart.
Medical document trade has been the large focus, however now we’re engaged on issues like reconciling remedy lists and real-time notifications of affected person exercise within the well being system. Perhaps the house care nurse must know that the affected person has a health care provider’s appointment tomorrow, they usually wish to know the outcomes of that go to earlier than their subsequent go to.
HCI: Let’s say the acute care methods is on Epic, and also you go in and do this integration work. Then you definately go work with a special acute care supplier that is additionally on Epic. Is the work principally already carried out or is it beginning over from scratch as a result of their model of Epic is totally different, and it takes about the identical quantity of labor to truly get that carried out?
Saxon: Our present system takes about eight to 12 weeks to implement. There’s some customization, however there’s a product that we’re implementing that’s repeatable, and an implementation methodology for it. We’re really making an attempt to make the implementation interval shorter over time.
HCI: Are there any specific challenges that your crew has to work by way of with the acute care EHR and with CIOs on the well being system stage to make this occur?
Saxon: So I have been a part of three, and I’d say all three have been a bit of totally different. However we’ve got developed some finest practices and are getting all of them on the identical highway map, and we’re hoping so as to add extra partnerships because the well being methods are prepared. I’d say, in all probability the largest problem is establishing that first relationship with the well being system, however I believe the know-how half is fairly simple really.
HCI: Have you ever been doing this lengthy sufficient that you’ve got been in a position to see outcomes like slicing down on redundant paperwork or efficiencies within the care transitions that folks discover or can measure?
Saxon: Sure, we have seen elevated affected person quantity based mostly on choice and worth that’s created, so we’re in a position to reply extra rapidly to referral requests. We’re in a position to provoke care quicker, too. You possibly can measure that — the period of time from when the discharge occurs to when the referral and the admission occurs. And diminished hospitalization is one other one which we deal with. So these are our key metrics for achievement.
HCI: We hear on a regular basis, on the acute care aspect about making an attempt to chop down on the executive burden for clinicians. It feels like that is one of many advantages right here.
Saxon: Sure, for the house care clinicians, particularly, that is the place they’re getting a life-changing expertise. For them, scientific documentation is extra particular. There are higher compliance checks and higher continuity.
HCI: On the acute care aspect within the EHR market now, lots of people are highlighting the potential of AI, they usually’re targeted on utilizing scribes and voice know-how. Is any of that going down right here?
Saxon: We had some earlier use of voice to textual content after which they might evaluate narratives for completeness, and that is been frequent within the business for a number of years. Pennant does presently have a pilot with one firm and has explored know-how on this area for the final 12 months. We’re making an attempt to be very protected with the way it works. We anticipate to have elements of the documentation for all our clinicians carried out that means by the top of the 12 months, and more and more sooner or later. I believe point-of-care documentation is altering from checkbox inquiries to narratives and prompting if the mandatory elements of care had been supplied or not and utilizing voice know-how to reply to these questions. We even have deployed telehealth to watch sufferers’ vitals at dwelling.
HCI: The rest you wish to point out about this integration work?
Saxon: Though Homecare Homebase is the first vendor we work with, we’ve got different built-in companions and our personal know-how suite. Homecare Homebase is on the heart of it, as a result of it is the primary well being document for dwelling well being and hospice. However I additionally wish to emphasize Pennant’s inside improvement. We’ve a 10-person improvement crew that builds options to optimize many elements of the healthcare course of, corresponding to dwelling well being episodic administration. We do automated texting and reminders to sufferers. We’ve different third-party companions that present issues like doc administration, workflow, coding, and Oasis companies, background checks, eligibility checks, and well being info trade connectivity for entry to sharing affected person info. We’re working with Kno2 on interoperability.
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