Caritas' New Data Strategy Designed to Improve Care, Reduce Costs

Rothenhaus says the new system will "absolutely" improve quality and lower costs, most notably by giving Caritas staff and patients an "early warning" system.

For example, Caritas plans to use the system to identify patients who are in the hospital and may have suddenly developed abnormal vital signs, or possibly even have laboratory data that hasn't been reported back yet. This will be done in a formal fashion to understand which patients may be in need of higher of care like moving to the ICU, Rothenhaus says.

"Conversely, it can give us the ability to look across the system to see people who might no longer need ICU care, and can be put a step down to a floor bed and thereby conserve some resources," he says.

Caritas will also implement the Amalga UIS Quality Measures module to facilitate compliance with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services core quality measures. The module captures data on all patients as they enter the hospital and determines whether a patient is a core measurement candidate, allowing the hospital to track and measure compliance.

"We view our adoption of Amalga and HealthVault as strategic drivers that will help us achieve our core goals of empowering patients and their caregivers, advancing data interoperability, and ensuring better health outcomes at a lower cost, while at the same time providing flexibility to react and respond to changing industry requirements," Rothenhaus says.