Paul Black CEO of Allscripts Healthcare Solutions http://allscripts.com appeared before the House Ways and Means Committee’s http://waysandmeans.house.gov Subcommittee on Health to talk about the innovation taking place across the healthcare industry. As he emphasized, “Innovation is key to describing the tremendous developments taking place in healthcare which is being led by the private sector.”
He presented several examples of what has been accomplished at his company and future undertakings: One system the Allscripts “dbMotion™ interoperability platform provides an advanced information exchange and patient matching engine.
This use of technology brings together clinical content from across a connected community into a single view which is accessible within both Allscripts and non-Allscripts EHRs. So far, dbMotion clients can connect to more than 350 different data sources patient portal technologies, state public health departments, and with other HIEs.
In using dbMotion, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center www.upmc.com has reduced the wait time for patient information from up to 20 hours down to as fast as five seconds, The number of patients not ready for the operating room decreased from 30 percent to 15 percent.
At Baylor Scott and White Health https://baylorscottandwhite.com in northern Texas, a 12 year old girl was spared a second CAT scan when the record of her soccer related concussion diagnosis and previous images from the ER were made available to a second emergency room physician who saw her a week later at a different hospital. In this case, preventing unnecessary radiation exposure saved her family almost $3,000 in unnecessary costs.
Black reports that the Allscripts Developer Program (ADP) includes an app that helps diabetic patients stay closely connected to their primary care physician, another app helps patients quickly provide medical history and payment information, plus an app helps providers connect patients to relevant clinical trials while the patient is still in the exam room.
In another example, a new medication dose range checking algorithm was implemented four years ago at Phoenix Children’s Hospital www.phoenixchildens.org within Allscripts Sunrise Clinical Manager EHR. Since that time, providers have seen a significant reduction in prescribing errors with only 3 percent of all medication orders now needing a dosing error alert.
AHRQ www.ahrq.gov reports that sepsis care cost the country more than $20 billion in 2011 with costs rising on average by 11.9 percent annually. To deal with the high cost of dealing with sepsis, Orlando Health www.orlandohealth.com has created an early sepsis detection workflow on top of an Allscripts solution that has led to a 14 percent reduction in overall sepsis mortality rare as well as an 8 percent reduction in the average length of stay for sepsis.
According to Black, “Readmissions to inpatient facilities puts a big strain on healthcare systems. Now a tool is available that helps to calculate a readmission probability based on length of stay, acute admission in the past, comorbidities, and ER visits. This tool is referred to as L.A.C.E.”
Allscripts client University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center www.uhospitals.org/cleveland has used each patient’s L.A.C.E score in conjunction with an Allscripts solution to establish a program to ensure that high risk patients for readmission to the hospital receive post-acute care and receive coordinated care with their primary care provider. In the first year there has been a 50 percent reduction in all-cause readmissions.
Lastly, Allscripts is working in the area of precision medicine and has recently launched their 2bPrecise solution to help caregivers identify patients who are the best candidates for genomic sequencing. The goal is to make the results of that sequencing available, understandable, and actionable at the point-of-care.