The Pennant Group Inc., a holding firm for greater than 120 residence well being and hospice businesses in addition to greater than 50 senior residing communities, has developed tech interoperability partnerships with acute-care well being methods comparable to Scripps Well being, John Muir Well being and Hartford Healthcare. Pennant CIO Bryant Saxon not too long ago 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 house well being and hospice businesses or are they utilizing a variety of completely different options at each?
Saxon: It is a mixture of each. We’re at all times striving towards standardization, however we additionally satisfaction ourselves on having petri dishes the place we discover completely 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 group to maintain the petri dishes going, determine those which can be 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 major well being IT vendor Homecare Homebase on these. May you discuss somewhat 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’ve gotten the best alternative to ship high-quality care in case 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 in is that oftentimes well being methods are utilizing a system that’s sub-optimal for a specific service line. Possibly it is nice for the bigger hospital system, however possibly not for post-acute care or residence care. So we are available in 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 can be 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 utility for seeing their chart, so we be sure that they will see different EMR medical document information inside My Chart.
Medical document change has been the massive 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. Possibly the house care nurse must know that the affected person has a physician’s appointment tomorrow, they usually need 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 largely already carried out or is it beginning over from scratch as a result of their model of Epic is completely 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 may be some customization, however there’s a product that we’re implementing that’s repeatable, and an implementation methodology for it. We’re truly making an attempt to make the implementation interval shorter over time.
HCI: Are there any specific challenges that your group has to work by way of with the acute care EHR and with CIOs on the well being system degree to make this occur?
Saxon: So I have been a part of three, and I’d say all three have been somewhat completely different. However now we have developed some greatest 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 keen. I’d say, in all probability the largest problem is establishing that first relationship with the well being system, however I feel the know-how half is fairly straightforward truly.
HCI: Have you ever been doing this lengthy sufficient that you’ve got been in a position to see outcomes like reducing 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 primarily based on choice and worth that’s created, so we’re in a position to reply extra shortly 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 lowered hospitalization is one other one which we give attention to. 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 happening right here?
Saxon: We had some earlier use of voice to textual content after which they’d overview narratives for completeness, and that is been widespread within the business for a number of years. Pennant does presently have a pilot with one firm and has explored know-how on this house for the final yr. We’re making an attempt to be very secure with the way it works. We count on to have elements of the documentation for all our clinicians carried out that manner by the top of the yr, and more and more sooner or later. I feel point-of-care documentation is altering from checkbox inquiries to narratives and prompting if the required elements of care had been offered or not and utilizing voice know-how to reply to these questions. We even have deployed telehealth to watch sufferers’ vitals at residence.
HCI: Anything you need to point out about this integration work?
Saxon: Though Homecare Homebase is the first vendor we work with, now we have different built-in companions and our personal know-how suite. Homecare Homebase is on the middle of it, as a result of it is the primary well being document for residence well being and hospice. However I additionally need to emphasize Pennant’s inner improvement. We’ve a 10-person improvement group that builds options to optimize many elements of the healthcare course of, comparable to residence 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 providers, background checks, eligibility checks, and well being info change connectivity for entry to sharing affected person info. We’re working with Kno2 on interoperability.
