Caritas Christi Health Care has announced a partnership with Microsoft on a system-wide data and patient relationship strategy that the Boston-based hospital network says will improve quality and reduce healthcare costs.
Using the Microsoft Amalga Unified Intelligence System, Caritas will aggregate patient data that was previously stored across multiple systems. The move will provide physicians with a real time, complete picture of a patient's medical history at the point of care, say Caritas officials.
"I think hospitals are starting to look at patient relationship management . . . and that we are going to go move from a fee-for-service model where doing more things makes us money to being in a mode where understanding patients' disease and preventing disease actually makes us money," says Todd Rothenhaus, MD, senior vice president and CIO at Caritas.
"The key to that, I think, is really understanding what kind of care is being delivered to our patients no matter where it occurs."
Caritas Christi serves 55 communities throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island, so officials were searching for a way to solve data challenges faced the multiple providers, including inadequate tools for reporting and analysis, difficulty extracting data for reuse over time, and challenges connecting critical patient data stored in multiple systems.
The Amalga system will help address those needs, providing physicians and staff members with a single point of access to all data stored across many systems and a comprehensive view of patients, say Caritas officials.
"Our relationship with Microsoft will use technology to integrate our healthcare delivery system and accelerate our mission of using the full leverage of our six hospitals and 13,000 employees to deliver world class, community-based care," said Caritas Christi Health Care CEO Ralph de la Torre, MD, in a statement.
Also under the agreement, Caritas will enable patients in its communities to access their personal health data both inside and outside the hospital using Microsoft HealthVault, the personal health information platform.
This "patient empowerment" strategy will enable patients and caregivers access to and storage of their personal health information, including medical summary data, provider information, appointments, and insurance and billing information. Patients can then share this information, if they choose, with their physicians through HealthVault.
"You can look at data that's acquired through their personal health record and you are able to identify people who are at risk for the development of diseases and thereby intervene," Rothenhaus says. "If we know through HealthVault that their daily weights are increasing, we can intervene and call the patient and have them adjust their medication so they do not end up in the ER or hospital again."
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.