The Pennant Group Inc., a company holding more than 120 health and hospice agencies at home, as well as more than 50 Senior life communities, has developed technological interoperability associations with acute care health systems such as Health, John Muir Health and Hartford Healthcare. Pennant Cio Bryant Saxon recently spoke with Health innovation About the creation of integrations between acute and domestic health systems to promote the continuity of care.
Health innovation: Do you try to unify the technology platform in all health and hospice agencies at home or are they using many different solutions in each one?
Saxon: It is a mixture of both. We always strive to standardize, but we also proud to have Petri dishes where we explore different technologies. A unique part of our operational model is linked to our culture of local decision making, so I feel it is my work in a centralized innovation team to maintain Petri dishes, identify those that work and implement them widely.
HCI: I was interested in having developed associations with scripps, John Muir and Hartford Healthcare. I also understand that you work in close collaboration with your main base of security houses for the health IT supplier in these. Could you talk a little about how these associations joined and why interoperability between systems is key for them to work?
Saxon: With a health system, you have the greatest opportunity to provide high quality care if you can coordinate each part of the patient’s movement through the continuum of care through information exchange. Where the base and flag of Homecare enter is that often health systems are using a system that is suboptimal for a particular service line. It may be excellent for the largest hospital system, but perhaps not for the attention after the acute or home care. Therefore, we enter and implement specialized solutions to address all these specific gaps that can be created. The greatest is the medical order firm. In the native EMR that is using the hospital system, we allow them to sign orders that are generated from the domestic houses base.
We also contribute value to the hospital system by warning them of the appropriate billing opportunities in which they provide care coordination. Patients use things like Epic Mychart as a single application to see their graph, so we ensure that they can see other data from EMR medical records within my graph.
The exchange of medical records has been the great focus, but now we are working on things such as reconciling medication lists and real -time notifications of patient activity in the health system. Perhaps the home care nurse needs to know that the patient has an appointment with the doctor tomorrow and wants to know the results of that visit before her next visit.
HCI: Let’s say that acute care systems are in epic, and you enter and do that integration work. Then he works with a different acute care provider that is also in Epic. Is the work already done mostly or is it starting again from scratch because its version of Epic is different, and the same amount of work is needed to really do it?
Saxon: Our current system takes between eight and 12 weeks to be implemented. There is some customization, but there is a product that we are implementing that it is repeatable and a method of implementation for it. Actually, we are trying to make the implementation period shorter over time.
HCI: Is there any particular challenge that your team has to work with the EHR of acute care and with the CIO at the health system level for this to happen?
Saxon: So I have been part of three, and I would say that the three have been a bit different. But we have developed some best practices and we are taking them all on the same roadmap, and we hope to add more associations as the health systems are willing. I would say that the greatest challenge is probably to establish that first relationship with the health system, but I think the technological part is quite easy.
HCI: Have you been doing this enough time for results to reduce paperwork or redundant efficiencies in care transitions that people notice or can measure?
Saxon: Yes, we have seen an increase in the patient’s volume depending on the preference and the value created, so we can respond more quickly to reference requests. We can also start faster attention. You can measure that: the amount of time since when the discharge occurs when the reference and admission occurs. And reduced hospitalization is another on which we focus. So those are our key metrics for success.
HCI: We listen all the time, on the side of acute care about trying to reduce administrative burden for doctors. It seems that this is one of the benefits here.
Saxon: Yes, for home care doctors, specifically, that is where they are getting an experience that changes life. For them, clinical documentation is more specific. There are better compliance controls and better continuity.
HCI: On the side of acute care in the EHR market, many people are highlighting the AI potential and focus on using writers and voice technology. Is any of that taking place here?
Saxon: We had an earlier use of the voice for the text message and then review the narratives to complete, and that has been common in the industry for several years. Pennant currently has a pilot with a company and has explored technology in this space during the last year. We are trying to be very safe with how it works. We hope to have parts of the documentation for all our doctors in that way for the end of the year, and increasingly in the future. I believe that the documentation at the point of attention is changing the questions of the verification box to the narratives and the application whether or not the necessary parts of the attention were provided and using voice technology to answer those questions. We have also implemented Telesalud to monitor the vital of patients at home.
HCI: anything else you want to mention about this integration work?
Saxon: Although Homecare Homebase is the main provider we work with, we have other integrated partners and our own technological suite. Homecare Homebase is in the center of it, because it is the main health history for health and hospice at home. But I also want to emphasize Pennant’s internal development. We have a development team of 10 people that build solutions to optimize many parts of the health process, such as episodic health management at home. We make automated text messages and reminders for patients. We have other third -party partners who provide things such as document management, workflow, coding and Oasis services, background verifications, eligibility verifications and health information exchange connectivity to access the patient information exchange. We are working with interoperability KNO2.
