MINNEAPOLIS – March 5, 2020 – LogicStream Health, a leading clinical process improvement and control software provider supporting hundreds of hospitals nationwide and developer of The Drug Shortage App, is offering early warning of drug shortages to hospitals in the United States free of charge as potential disruptions in the supply of drugs looms due to the Coronavirus (COVID-19). Hospitals and health systems can sign up for the free service by sending an email to earlywarning@logicstreamhealth.com and requesting to receive the notifications.
There have been multiple media reports highlighting potential problems the Coronavirus could cause for hospitals, health systems and patients who depend on life-saving medications. With China being the largest supplier of active pharmaceutical ingredients (API), any issues procuring medications from the country could cause long-term effects.
“A key feature of The Drug Shortage App from LogicStream Health™ is an early warning of potential drug shortages,” said Patrick Yoder, PharmD, CEO, LogicStream Health. “The early warning notifications often provide several days advance notice of upcoming shortages so hospitals can address a potential shortage sooner. As good stewards of this information, we’ve decided to offer this service free of charge to any hospital or health system in the United States during this outbreak. By sharing this information, we hope to do our part to keep our country secure during a trying time.”
The Drug Shortage App evaluates the pharmacy supply chain within hospitals to determine when a shortage is likely to occur. The automated system generates email notifications that are sent to customers alerting them of the situation and the potential shortage. Then, using The App, LogicStream Health customers can automatically assess the situation, determine the providers, departments and locations that are driving demand of the medication, understand current inventory levels and calculate an expected out-of-stock date. The App then creates an action plan to help communications and ensure the best possible care is delivered during a shortage.
The offer of advance notification is for a limited time as hospitals and health systems prepare for and work through the current Coronavirus-related shortages. To sign up for the service, contact earlywarning@logicstreamhealth.com.
About LogicStream Health LogicStream Health is trusted by a community of high-performing healthcare providers across the United States. The company’s clinical process control and improvement software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform stands alone in its ability to help customers gain instant insights to improve vital clinical processes and patient care. As a result, customers reduce cost and improve outcomes. The LogicStream Health SaaS platform is ‘must-have’ technology enabling clinical teams to quickly improve clinical processes in near-real-time and is designed for rapid implementation and easy adoption by end-user clinicians, informaticists, data analysts and executive teams. LogicStream Health software today is supporting hundreds of hospitals on a scalable and sustainable technology platform to standardize processes and deliver highly reliable healthcare. For more information, please visit www.LogicStreamHealth.com.
As Hospitals Work to Solve Drug Diversion Problem, LogicStream Health Expands Pharmacy Software Suite by Introducing The Drug Diversion App
MINNEAPOLIS – December 9, 2019 – LogicStream Health, a leading clinical process improvement and control software provider supporting hundreds of hospitals nationwide, introduced new software that helps hospital pharmacy teams proactively manage and better control drug diversion activity.
The Drug Diversion App from LogicStream Health™ gives hospitals early warning signals about potential instances of drug diversion and clinicians who may be diverting medications. According to Patrick Yoder, PharmD, CEO and co-founder of LogicStream Health, “The Drug Diversion App is truly unique because it aggregates electronic health record (EHR), automated dispensing cabinet (ADC) and carousel data, as well as other data sources to produce an ongoing stream of information and notification of potential diversion activity.”
Dr. Yoder said The Drug Diversion App “provides active surveillance of drug ordering, administration and all dispensation activities, signaling to administrators and clinical leaders which clinicians are potentially diverting drugs.” The App combines multiple data sources to detect warning signs attributable to an individual, rather than comparing data medication by medication. “This approach allows for a deeper investigation leading to a decision to intervene or to dismiss warning signals, all from within The App.”
The Drug Diversion App is scheduled to be released in the first quarter of 2020, with several innovation partners beginning trial use in January. The Drug Diversion App is part of an expanding suite of pharmacy software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps running on the LogicStream Health Clinical Process Improvement and Control Platform that provides insights to better manage problems like drug diversion and drug shortages. The company introduced The Drug Shortage App from LogicStream Health™ in December 2018. Since its introduction, The Drug Shortage App has been selected for use by nearly 100 hospitals.
Demonstrations of The Drug Diversion App and The Drug Shortage App were held at the ASHP Midyear 2019 Clinical Meeting & Exhibition and are available now for you to see!
About LogicStream Health LogicStream Health is trusted by a community of high-performing healthcare providers across the United States. The company’s clinical process control and improvement SaaS platform stands alone in its ability to help customers gain instant insights to improve vital clinical processes and patient care. As a result, customers reduce cost and improve outcomes.
The LogicStream Health SaaS platform is ‘must-have’ technology enabling clinical teams to quickly improve clinical processes in near-real-time and is designed for rapid implementation and easy adoption by end-user clinicians, informaticists, data analysts and executive teams. LogicStream Health software today is supporting hundreds of hospitals on a scalable and sustainable technology platform to standardize processes and deliver highly reliable healthcare. For more information, please visit www.LogicStreamHealth.com.
LogicStream Health, Inc. announced today that Hennepin Healthcare is extending its contract for the LogicStream Health Clinical Process Improvement and Control Platform. The Platform supports Hennepin Healthcare’s goal of continuously improving and delivering highly reliable healthcare by standardizing processes, driving clinician adoption and understanding the impact its care delivery is having on clinical outcomes.
Since its initial implementation, the Clinical Process Improvement and Control Platform has created efficiencies and filled significant gaps in clinical, self-service reporting to drive significant clinical and operating productivity. With the platform, the Hennepin Healthcare team focuses on eliminating unnecessary testing and reducing excessive spend. One of the key capabilities of the platform is the ability to build specific solutions, such as The Drug Shortage App from LogicStream Health™, that allows health systems to better manage and control shortages, on top of the enterprise SaaS offering.
Given the multidisciplinary nature of care delivery, organizations need to put an enterprise-level focus on the entire care team versus individual clinicians. The LogicStream Platform supports a growing community of high-performing healthcare providers across the U.S. who recognize their electronic health record (EHR) systems are not designed to efficiently support opportunities for continuous clinical process improvement initiatives. LogicStream delivers the necessary tools to unlock data insights to improve system-wide clinical processes driving outcomes, patient/provider satisfaction and financial performance.
“Health systems across the country are working to make their EHR data actionable for improved care delivery. The promise of the EHR solving the problems of standardization and clinical variation have not materialized,” said Luis Saldaña, M.D., LogicStream Chief Medical Informatics Officer. “LogicStream’s cloud-based platform allows health systems to quickly and effectively drive standardization in care delivery processes and workflows. Clinical leaders can then measure adoption of these improved processes to deliver care to understand how they’re impacting outcomes.”
AboutHennepin Healthcare
Hennepin Healthcare is an integrated system of care that includes a nationally recognized Level I Adult and Pediatric Trauma Center, an acute care hospital, as well as a clinic system with primary care clinics located in Minneapolis and across Hennepin County. The healthcare system includes a 484-bed academic medical center, a large outpatient Clinic & Specialty Center, and a network of clinics downtown, in the North Loop, Whittier, East Lake Street neighborhoods of Minneapolis, and in suburban communities of Brooklyn Park, Golden Valley, Richfield, and St. Anthony Village. Hennepin Healthcare has a large psychiatric program, home care, and hospice, and operates a research institute, innovation center, and philanthropic foundation. The system is operated by Hennepin Healthcare System, Inc., a subsidiary corporation of Hennepin County.
About LogicStream Health
LogicStream Health is trusted by a community of high-performing healthcare providers across the United States. The company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform stands alone in its ability to help customers gain instant insights to improve vital clinical processes and better control patient care. As a result, customers reduce cost and improve outcomes. Healthcare customers are generating millions of dollars in ROI from the LogicStream Health platform, for example, by reducing high-cost medications; achieving significant reductions in CAUTI; and, reaching nearly 100% compliance with VTE protocols. The LogicStream Health SaaS platform complements modern EHR systems and is designed for rapid implementation and easy adoption by end-user clinicians, informaticists, data analysts, and executive teams striving to better control and manage clinical processes in near-real-time. LogicStream Health, developed by clinicians for clinicians, today is supporting hundreds of hospitals on a scalable and sustainable technology platform to standardize process and deliver highly reliable healthcare. For more information, visit our home page. Our mission is clear – Helping clinicians improve and better control the care they deliver to every patient, every day.
The following is a guest article on clinical documentation by Jessica Campbell, DNP, RN, Clinical Informaticist at LogicStream Health and Tiffany McCauley, MSN, RN, Clinical Executive at Elsevier.
Clinical documentation is widely known to be a time-consuming task. Much of that documenting rests on the shoulders of nurses, who use health information technology to help juggle their many roles: caring for patients, helping to maximize performance in the midst of changing reimbursement models, achieving regulatory compliance, promoting better outcomes and increasing patient satisfaction.
Unfortunately, nurses often feel as though the tools designed to help capture and share information are part of the problem. A major issue is lack of standardization. Some healthcare organizations attempt to meet everyone’s needs by creating specific resources to accommodate individual clinicians or departments. That lack of consistency paired with excess requirements leads to variability in care. While everyone agrees that capturing, documenting and disseminating clinical data is essential, it’s also clear that there’s a need to improve how it’s done, including the processes and tools involved.
“Nursing documentation as a whole is frequently enhanced and expanded upon, and flowsheet-related content is no exception,” explains Jessica Campbell, DNP, RN, Clinical Informaticist, LogicStream Health. “Often, flowsheet rows are customized, causing unnecessary variation and duplication. As a result, multiple versions of a single flowsheet row can send users down different pathways. Unfortunately, these duplications persist within the EHR where they go on to deliver outdated and often competing guidance long after evidence-based best practices have been revised.”
Driving fragmented care
“Traditional workflows used by nurses and then the rest of the care team often contribute to fragmented care,” says Tiffany McCauley, MSN, RN, Clinical Executive, Elsevier. “This can happen due to the siloed-nature of healthcare settings, such as differences between the ambulatory and acute care settings, or varying approaches used by various specialties, but we also see fragmented care within a single department. The reason is that each discipline, or interprofessional teammate, has their own set of tools they use, which live in the EHR but never get merged together.”
For example, if a physical therapist (PT) has just been at the bedside visiting a patient, how does the nurse tap into the information coming out of that visit? Can the nurse easily find out what the PT thinks about how the patient is doing and the care plan they have put in place? Are those insights, which are essential to ensure patient safety, brought to life within the nursing workflow? Or does the nurse have to search the EHR to find it? Unfortunately, it’s often the latter. If the nurse isn’t aware that the PT goal for the patient is walking 50 feet that day with a standby assist, the nurse might have the patient walk more – or less – and do so unassisted.
Consider how discrepancies like the PT example are multiplied throughout the day for every patient, because insights from each member of the care team all exist in different parts of the EHR. They’re all guided by different workflows, some of which may be driven by outdated evidence. It paints a compelling case of the urgent need for optimization.
“Care fragmentation increases patient healthcare costs while diminishing the quality of care,” says McCauley. “In this environment, important health issues are not properly addressed, patient health outcomes are at risk, and there is an increased likelihood of unnecessary or potentially harmful health services.”
Documentation optimization is even more critical when caring for patients who endure one or more chronic conditions and are particularly at risk of fragmented care. That’s because caring for these patients typically involves multiple participants who each provide specialized knowledge, skills and services. What needs to be done to fix this problem and provide coordinated care? One answer is to optimize processes and systems to reduce variation and ensure clinicians are using up-to-date, evidence-based guidance.
Building in evidence-based guidance
“The volume of available medical knowledge is doubling every few months as new guidelines are released and standards are updated,” says McCauley. “It’s unrealistic for any care team to keep up with all the relevant, evidence-based information that impacts patient care. That’s why the integration of evidence-based medicine into clinical workflows is essential. Its application at the bedside drives ongoing improvements in clinical decision-making and, ultimately, overall patient outcomes.”
So how do hospitals streamline their systems to remove variation and consistently deliver current, evidence-based guidance? First, it helps to understand how the content inside the EHR tends to evolve, and why.
“Hospital systems make multiple changes in their EHRs every day,” says Campbell. “Sometimes those modifications are based on the unique needs of a specialty area, but other requests for changes may be rooted in how a team in a particular nursing department prefers to interact with the system. These changes are made with the intent of increasing efficiency, but the overall impact often is just the opposite.”
Using data-driven insights
To optimize nursing documentation, health systems are using clinical process improvement solutions that provide data-driven insights into the extent of duplication, frequency of changes and comparison with best practices to determine which guidance has the most clinical value. Armed with that information, hospitals can make necessary adjustments to their EHR.
In addition to speeding up the documentation process, the removal of unnecessary flowsheet duplication helps the entire clinical team ensure continuity of care when the patient is transitioned to another part of the health system. This is especially important when caring for patients with complex health needs.
“Technology solutions are now available to assess the clinician workflows and understand how care is being provided. By evaluating workflows alongside outcomes, health systems can understand where the evidence-based best practices are being followed and where they can be implemented,” said Campbell. “More importantly, once those workflows are implemented, measuring and managing those workflows as the evidence changes are ways we can have a significant positive impact on patient outcomes.”
Increasing satisfaction
Clinicians are hungry for change. Reducing the documentation burden on nurses lets them focus on the more rewarding aspects of their job. A recent study revealed that 85 percent of clinicians agree that coordinated, collaborative, interprofessional practice increases their job satisfaction.
“If people don’t understand how to use the evidence-based content and apply it to their day-to-day work, then it’s not solving the issue of fragmented systems,” explains McCauley. “It’s important to achieve a balance by implementing the right content and technology while focusing on the clinical team’s perspective and working from there to achieve the interprofessional collaboration required under emerging quality-based care models.”
About Jessica Campbell, DNP, RN
Jessica Campbell, DNP, RN, is a Clinical Informaticist at LogicStream Health. Campbell is an informaticist and registered nurse focused on quality of care, improving documentation standards and clinical process improvement. As a registered nurse she provides care in the perioperative and critical care specialties. Campbell earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and her Doctor of Nursing Practice in Nursing Informatics from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
About Tiffany McCauley, MSN, RN
Tiffany McCauley, MSN, RN serves as a Nursing Executive with Elsevier Clinical Solutions. In this role she collaborates with health care systems, academic centers and physician practices to reduce variation in care, standardizing practice and improving patient outcomes through the application of evidence-based decisions at the point of care. Prior to joining Elsevier McCauley lead the development of nursing and patient education programs at a number of leading community-based health care organizations. Her focus has been on improving staff engagement and the patient experience by leading change initiatives related to standardizing clinical knowledge and practice while effectively engaging patients in their care across care settings. McCauley believes this is a key component in improving the healthcare experience for patients.
CMIO, Luis E. Saldaña, M.D., will be participating in two-panel discussions during the Becker’s Hospital Review fifth annual Health IT and Revenue Cycle Conference in Chicago (Photo: Business Wire)
MINNEAPOLIS, October 9, 2019 – LogicStream Health, a healthcare software firm, announced today that Luis E. Saldaña, M.D., the company’s Chief Medical Informatics Officer (CMIO), will be participating in two panel discussions during the Becker’s Hospital Review fifth annual Health IT and Revenue Cycle Conference in Chicago:
“Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) – Ensuring ROI, Improving Physician Satisfaction and More” at 1:15 p.m. Oct. 11, 2019
“The Evolving Role of CMIOs Today” at 3:15 p.m. Oct. 11, 2019
Dr. Saldaña will provide his perspective about how LogicStream Health’s clinical process control and improvement software is helping customers decrease clinical variation, waste and cost while improving patient care and outcomes. He also brings insights from his previous role as CMIO at Texas Health Resources (THR), where he led the application of key technologies to drive optimal care and was responsible for ensuring clinical data was leveraged to improve patient care and operational efficiency.
“I look forward to sharing insights from one of healthcare’s most innovative software firms along with my experience using LogicStream Health software at THR to drive out inefficiency and standardize workflows to deliver better patient care,” said Dr. Saldaña.
“I look forward to sharing insights from one of healthcare’s most innovative software firms along with my experience using LogicStream Health software at THR to drive out inefficiency and standardize workflows to deliver better patient care,” said Dr. Saldaña.
More than 4,000 attendees are expected at the conference, held Oct. 9 to 12, 2019 at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago.
About LogicStream Health
LogicStream Health’s clinical process control and improvement software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform stands alone in its ability to help customers gain instant insights to improve vital clinical processes and patient care. As a result, customers reduce cost and improve outcomes. Customers are saving millions of dollars with the LogicStream Health platform. The LogicStream Health SaaS platform enables clinical teams to quickly improve clinical processes and is used widely by end-user clinicians, pharmacists, informaticists, data analysts and executive teams. LogicStream Health today is helping hundreds of hospitals standardize their processes and deliver highly reliable healthcare. For more information, please visitwww.LogicStreamHealth.com.
By Jessica Campbell, DNP, RN, Clinical Informaticist, LogicStream Health & Tiffany McCauley, MSN, RN, Clinical Executive, Elsevier
How process, evidence and technology come together to improve coordination of patient care, increase efficiency and boost clinician satisfaction
Hospital systems rely on nurses to do more than ever before. Beyond caring for patients, nurses are tasked with helping to maximize performance in the midst of changing reimbursement models, achieve regulatory compliance, promote better outcomes and increase patient satisfaction. Nurses are under an immense amount of pressure to provide coordinated patient care. Sometimes, the biggest challenge is feeling as though the tools designed to help capture and share information are part of the problem.
A major problem is lack of standardization. Organizations attempt to meet everyone’s needs by creating specific resources to accommodate individual clinicians or departments. The lack of consistency paired with excess requirements leads to variability in care.
The good news is that optimizing clinical documentation can yield significant benefits, including improvements in patient care and safety, clinician satisfaction and efficiency, as well as a reduction in errors and unnecessary procedures.
19 to 35 percent of nursing practice time is spent documenting care
Nurses document an average of one data point every minute
There are more than 600 manual flowsheet data entries into electronic health records (EHRs) during a 12-hour shift
The study examined the number and frequency of data points entered into an EHR by bedside nurses working in acute care general medicine units and intensive care units (ICUs) for 12 months. The researchers discovered that on average during a 12-hour shift, nurses perform 787 to 852 flowsheet data entries in an ICU and 667 to 930 flowsheet data entries on an acute care floor. That’s a lot of data.
In addition to items measured in the study, other documentation requirements consume additional time, such as medication administration, plan of care, patient education and narrative notes. For example, other research findings cited in the study showed that nurses spend approximately 21 to 38 minutes writing narrative notes every day.
Fueling the documentation burden
Everyone agrees that capturing, documenting and disseminating clinical data is essential. It’s also clear that there’s a need to improve how it’s done, including the processes and tools involved, since a major contributor to the nursing documentation burden is unnecessary variation.
“Nursing documentation as a whole is frequently enhanced and expanded upon, flowsheet related content is no exception,” explains Jessica Campbell, DNP, RN, Clinical Informaticist, LogicStream Health. “Often, flowsheet rows are customized, causing unnecessary variation and duplication. As a result, multiple versions of a single flowsheet row can send users down different pathways. Unfortunately, these duplications persist within the EHR where they go on to deliver outdated and often competing guidance long after evidence-based best practices have been revised.”
Contributing to fragmented care
“Traditional workflows used by nurses and then the rest of the care team often contribute to fragmented care,” says Tiffany McCauley, MSN, RN, Clinical Executive, Elsevier. “This can happen due to the siloed-nature of healthcare settings, such as differences between the ambulatory and acute care settings, or varying approaches used by various specialties, but we also see fragmented care with a single department. The reason is that each discipline, or interprofessional teammate, has their own set of tools they use, which live in the EHR but never get merged together.”
For example, if a physical therapist (PT) has just been at the bedside visiting a patient, how does the nurse tap into the information coming out of that visit? Can the nurse easily find out what the PT thinks about how the patient is doing and the care plan they have put in place? Are those insights, which are essential to ensure patient safety, brought to life within the nursing workflow? Or does the nurse have to search the EHR to find it? Unfortunately, it’s often the latter. That inefficiency is a significant burden given how busy care teams are. If the nurse isn’t aware that the PT goal for the patient is walking 50 feet that day with a standby assist, the nurse might have the patient walk more – or less – and do so unassisted.
Consider how discrepancies like the PT example are multiplied throughout the day for every patient because insights from each member of the care team all exist in different parts of the EHR. They’re all guided by different workflows, some of which may be driven by outdated evidence. It paints a compelling case of the urgent need for optimization.
“Care fragmentation increases patient healthcare costs while diminishing the quality of care,” says McCauley. “In this environment, important health issues are not properly addressed, patient health outcomes are at risk, and there is an increased likelihood of unnecessary or potentially harmful health services.”
Data shows that the time lag between when clinical measurements or observations are made and when they get reported in flowsheets varies. These delays can have a negative impact on patient care. Getting accurate and timely information into the hands of the care providers is essential for patient safety.
Source: LogicStream Health
Complex patients
Documentation optimization is even more critical when caring for patients who endure one or more chronic conditions and are particularly at risk of fragmented care. That’s because caring for these patients typically involves multiple participants who each provide specialized knowledge, skills, and services.
When fragmented care is provided to patients with complex conditions, they encounter higher rates of emergency department visits, more hospital admissions and greater healthcare costs. A 2018 study by The Commonwealth Fund, Whether Fragmented Care is Hazardous Depends on How Many Chronic Conditions a Patient Has, found that patients with one or two chronic conditions and highly fragmented care were 13 percent more likely to visit the emergency department than those who had the least fragmented care. A 2015 study in the American Journal of Managed Care, Care Fragmentation, Quality, and Costs Among Chronically Ill Patients, found that patients with highly fragmented care had an average total cost of $10,396 over a 35-month period, compared to an average cost of just $5,854 among those who received the least fragmented care during the same period of time.
So, what needs to be done to fix this problem and provide coordinated care? One answer is to optimize processes and systems to reduce variation and ensure clinicians are using up-to-date, evidence-based guidance.
Evidence-based workflows
“The volume of available medical knowledge is doubling every few months as new guidelines are released and standards are updated,” says McCauley. “It’s unrealistic for any care team to keep up with all the relevant, evidence-based information that impacts patient care. That’s why the integration of evidence-based medicine into clinical workflows is essential. Its application at the bedside drives ongoing improvements in clinical decision-making and, ultimately, overall patient outcomes.”
Evidence-informed care has many benefits. It reduces unwanted variability across the continuum, drives the plan of care in a meaningful manner and helps achieve regulatory compliance. Using tools such as a combined evidence-based comorbidities template, for example, can help reduce documentation fatigue for clinicians and improve continuity of care regardless of the healthcare setting.
Technology solutions
So how do hospitals streamline their systems to remove variation and consistently deliver up-to-date, evidence-based guidance? First, it helps to understand how the content inside the EHR tends to evolve, and why.
“Hospital systems make multiple changes in their EHRs every day,” says Campbell. “Sometimes those modifications are based on the unique needs of a specialty area, but other requests for changes may be rooted in how a team in a particular nursing department prefers to interact with the system. These changes are made with the intent of increasing efficiency, but the overall impact often is just the opposite.”
Campbell shared a few examples of the unintended consequences of workflow modifications:
Combining too much information in a single row. That sounds like efficiency, but instead is overwhelming and impacts a nurse’s cognitive workload. When multiple options for assessments and interventions are combined in a single row, nurses are less certain about what they’re expected to document.
Renaming flowsheet rows. In some cases, a flowsheet row, such as for catheter intervention, gets duplicated under a different name but has the same answers as the original row, so nurses end up using both options. This lack of consistency causes loss of standardization and creates a deviation from the desired clinical process. It also makes it much harder to aggregate data and decreases the visibility of documentation across care units and from nurse to nurse. This is often caused by personal favorites or requests from individual clinicians or departments that deviate from the hospital-approved standard.
Persistence of outdated guidance. Customized flowsheet rows often include guidelines that are no longer relevant or appropriate, but the health system doesn’t realize those rows still exist. Because guidelines are constantly changing, it’s essential to ensure that old information is removed when new evidence is added.
To optimize nursing documentation, health systems are using clinical process improvement solutions that provide data-driven insights into the extent of duplication, frequency of changes and comparison with best practices to determine which guidance has the most clinical value. Armed with that information, hospitals can make necessary adjustments to their EHR. In addition to speeding up the documentation process, the removal of unnecessary flowsheet duplication helps the entire clinical team ensure continuity of care when the patient is transitioned to another part of the health system.
Impact of coordinated care
Optimizing and standardizing the process of collecting and disseminating information to help drive coordinated care is essential. Why? Consider the following evidence of the impact of fragmented versus coordinated care.
Uncoordinated care leads to communication failure, higher drug costs, duplicate testing, a lack of patient engagement and higher readmission rates. According to the American Nurses Association, patients with uncoordinated care experience 75 percent higher costs than patients with coordinated care. The American Journal of Managed Care reported that fragmented care leads to twice as many primary care visits and six times as many specialist visits.
Patients experiencing highly fragmented care have twice as many primary care visits, and 6 times as many specialist visits.
Source: The American Journal of Managed Care, May 2015.
In contrast, patient-centered care coordination can have a compelling impact on patient outcomes and healthcare costs. Interprofessional collaboration and continuity of care are associated with better preventive care, fewer emergency department visits and hospital admissions, and better patient experience.
The power of interprofessional collaboration:
Source: Journal of Interprofessional Education & Practice. ScienceDirect. Jun 2017.
Clinician satisfaction and culture
Clinicians are hungry for a change. Reducing the documentation burden on nurses lets them focus on the more rewarding aspects of their job. A recent study revealed that 85 percent of clinicians agree that coordinated, collaborative, inter-disciplinary practice increases their job satisfaction.
As with any change, culture is a key component of successful system optimization. Technology tools alone aren’t going to drive evidence-based, interprofessional practice. From leadership to members of the clinical team, everyone must embrace the philosophy behind the tools to optimize and sustain an enhanced professional practice.
“If people don’t understand how to use the evidence-based content and apply it to their day-to-day work, then it’s not solving the issue of fragmented systems,” explains McCauley. “It’s important to achieve a balance by implementing the right content and technology while focusing on the clinical team’s perspective and working from there to achieve the multi-disciplinary collaboration required under emerging quality-based care models.”
“Technology solutions are now available to assess the clinician workflows and understand how care is being provided. By evaluating workflows alongside outcomes, health systems are able to understand what the evidence-based best practices are and how they can be implemented,” said Campbell. “More importantly, once those workflows are implemented, measuring and management of those workflows as the evidence changes are ways we can have a significant positive impact on patient outcomes.”
About the Authors
Jessica Campbell, DNP, RN, is a Clinical Informaticist at LogicStream Health. Campbell is an informaticist and registered nurse focused on quality of care, improving documentation standards and clinical process improvement. As a registered nurse she provides care in the perioperative and critical care specialties. Campbell earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and her Doctor of Nursing Practice in Nursing Informatics from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
Tiffany McCauley, MSN, RN, Clinical Executive, Elsevier Tiffany McCauley, MSN, RN serves as a Nursing Executive with Elsevier Clinical Solutions. In this role she collaborates with health care systems, academic centers and physician practices to reduce variation in care, standardizing practice and improving patient outcomes through the application of evidence-based decisions at the point of care. Prior to joining Elsevier McCauley lead the development of nursing and patient education programs at a number of leading community-based health care organizations. Her focus has been on improving staff engagement and the patient experience by leading change initiatives related to standardizing clinical knowledge and practice while effectively engaging patients in their care across care settings. McCauley believes this is a key component in improving the healthcare experience for patients.
MINNEAPOLISAugust 28, 2019 – LogicStream Health has appointed Luis E. Saldaña, M.D. as their Chief Medical Informatics Officer (CMIO).
Luis Saldaña, M.D.
Most recently, Dr. Saldaña
served as CMIO at Texas Health Resources (THR) where he led the application of
key technologies, such as the electronic health record system, to drive optimal
care within the Arlington-based health system. He was also responsible for ensuring
clinical data was leveraged to improve patient care and operational efficiency.
“Dr. Saldaña and
LogicStream Health have had a productive association during his time as CMIO at
THR, which has been a customer for several years,” said Patrick Yoder, PharmD,
CEO, LogicStream Health. “We are now fortunate to have Luis’ executive and
clinical informatics skills as part of the LogicStream Health team to serve our
entire customer community. Luis will help us set direction for product and
solutions and will advise and consult with customers on efforts to decrease clinical
variation and waste – an increasing priority for many of our customers.”
Among numerous professional highlights and commendations,
Dr. Saldaña has been recognized repeatedly by Becker’s Hospital
Review as one of “32 CMIOs to Know.” He also co-authored the
best-selling book, Improving Outcomes with Clinical Decision Support: An
Implementer’s Guide – 2nd Edition, which was honored as “Book of the
Year” by HIMSS.
“I am excited to
join LogicStream Health and be on the team at one of healthcare’s most
innovative software firms,” said Dr. Saldaña.
“For several years, I have personally experienced the extensive capability of
the LogicStream Health clinical process improvement and control platform that
enables clinical teams to easily identify opportunities to drive out variation
and inefficiency and standardize workflows
to deliver better patient care.”
About LogicStream Health LogicStream Health’s clinical process control and improvement software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform stands alone in its ability to help customers gain instant insights to improve vital clinical processes and patient care. As a result, customers reduce costs and improve outcomes. Customers are saving millions of dollars with the LogicStream Health platform. The LogicStream Health SaaS platform enables clinical teams to quickly improve clinical processes and is used widely by end-user clinicians, pharmacists, informaticists, data analysts and executive teams. LogicStream Health today is helping hundreds of hospitals standardize their processes and deliver highly reliable healthcare. For more information, please visit www.LogicStreamHealth.com.
Solution reduces documentation burden, with one large health system reducing documentation time by more than six minutes per nurse per shift.
Minneapolis, MN – August 8, 2019 – Elsevier, a global information analytics business specializing in science and health, and LogicStream Health, a leading provider of clinical process improvement and control software, will collaborate to meet health systems’ needs for optimizing their nursing practice and documentation.
Nurses are burdened with heavy documentation responsibilities, particularly into electronic health records (EHRs). A recent studyi found that nurses on average document one data point every minute and spend 19 to 35 percent of practice time documenting care. Capturing and making sense of that content, and alleviating some of that burden through smarter documentation, will save time and effort for nurses and improve patient care.
Elsevier and LogicStream Health are tackling the problem of nurse documentation burden together by closely aligning their products: LogicStream Health’s Clinical Process Improvement and Control Software Solutions and Elsevier’s Care Planning.
LogicStream Health’s Clinical Process Improvement and Control Software Solutions offers hospital and clinic staff an efficient and effective way to manage their nursing flowsheets and measure their effectiveness for the clinical care being delivered.
A Shared Vision
“Elsevier and LogicStream Health have a shared vision about the need to fix big, costly problems in healthcare associated with clinical variation,” said Patrick Yoder, PharmD, Chief Executive Officer, LogicStream Health. “Lack of standardization in nursing flowsheets causes an enormous burden in terms of cost and time that nurses spend on documentation and can be an impediment to delivering effective patient care. Customers using our platform and nursing documentation optimization solutions have saved millions of dollars in nursing overtime expense and related labor efficiencies in their clinical process improvement efforts. One large health system in the Midwest was able to eliminate more than six minutes of flowsheet documentation time per nurse per shift. For a health system with 1,000 nurses that translates to 120,000 hours of nursing time per year and could save more than $8M in overtime. We are very excited about bringing this solution to market with Elsevier, the world’s leader in healthcare analytics solutions.”
Elsevier’s Care Planning, the Category Leader for Clinical Decision Support: Care Plans and Order Sets in the Best in KLAS®: Software & Services Report* for three straight years, is the industry’s only EHR-based care planning solution that combines the patient story, more than 600 evidence-based clinical practice guidelines and standardized assessments into one patient-centered plan of care across all care settings and disciplines.
“Effective longitudinal care coordination combined with practice transformation and optimized documentation workflows can help healthcare organizations improve care delivery,” said Hajo Oltmanns, Senior Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, Clinical Solutions, Elsevier. “Elsevier is pleased to add LogicStream Health’s nurse documentation solution into our Care Planning suite. Together, we will help health systems reduce care variability and improve outcomes.”
LogicStream Health is trusted by a community of high-performing healthcare providers across the United States. The company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform stands alone in its ability to help customers gain instant insights to improve vital clinical processes and better control patient care. As a result, customers reduce cost and improve outcomes. Healthcare customers are generating millions of dollars in ROI from the LogicStream Health platform, for example, by reducing high-cost medications; achieving significant reductions in CAUTI; and, reaching nearly 100% compliance with VTE protocols. The LogicStream Health SaaS platform complements modern EHR systems and is designed for rapid implementation and easy adoption by end-user clinicians, informaticists, data analysts, and executive teams striving to better control and manage clinical processes in near-real-time. LogicStream Health, developed by clinicians for clinicians, today is supporting hundreds of hospitals on a scalable and sustainable technology platform to standardize process and deliver highly reliable healthcare. For more information, visit our home page. Our mission is clear – Helping clinicians improve and better control the care they deliver to every patient, every day.
About Elsevier
Elsevier is a global information analytics business that helps scientists and clinicians to find new answers, reshape human knowledge, and tackle the most urgent human crises. For 140 years, we have partnered with the research world to curate and verify scientific knowledge. Today, we’re committed to bringing that rigor to a new generation of platforms. Elsevier provides digital solutions and tools in the areas of strategic research management, R&D performance, clinical decision support, and professional education; including ScienceDirect, Scopus, SciVal, ClinicalKey and Sherpath. Elsevier publishes over 2,500 digitized journals, including The Lancet and Cell, 39,000 e-book titles and many iconic reference works, including Gray’s Anatomy. Elsevier is part of RELX, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers. www.elsevier.com.
Annual ‘Breakthrough Awards Program’ Recognizes Outstanding Technological Innovations in the Health and Medical Industries
Minneapolis, MN – June 6, 2019
LogicStream Health today announced that The Drug Shortage App From LogicStream HealthTM won the “Clinical Efficiency Innovation Award” by MedTech Breakthrough, an independent organization that recognizes technological innovation in the health and medical industries. This award comes from MedTech Breakthrough’s annual awards program, which garnered more than 3,500 nominations from across the globe.
The Drug Shortage App addresses the growing concern of the drug shortage crisis in the U.S. healthcare system, and its many negative repercussions. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the number and duration of prescription drug shortages is growing; these shortages lead to: rising drug costs; a negative impact on pharmacist productivity levels; compromised or delayed medical procedures and drug therapy efforts; and healthcare professionals forced to turn to other medications, which can lead to increased risks to patient safety.
The Drug Shortage App, however, works to provide healthcare
professionals and hospital pharmacists necessary early-warning information to
manage both supply and demand for specific medications during a shortage. The
app allows professionals to see which clinicians frequently prescribe and
dispense certain medications, to manage inventory levels, and evaluate when the
shortage is over.
Patrick Yoder, PharmD, Co-Founder and CEO, LogicStream Health, said,
“Our groundbreaking drug shortage app has tremendous momentum this year with
several new major U.S. health systems signing up and a healthy ongoing demand
and pipeline. We are thrilled to accept this honor from MedTech Breakthrough
and will continue to strive for innovation and excellence in all we do in our
mission to combat the nationwide drug shortage crisis.”
“The annual awards program celebrates the world’s most outstanding
Digital Health and Medical Technology products, services and companies, and
LogicStream Health’s Drug Shortage App is certainly one to celebrate,” said James
Johnson, managing director, MedTech Breakthrough. “This organization and
product is actively working to address a real concern within the healthcare
industry, and they continue to use innovation and creativity to do so. We are
proud to recognize LogicStream Health as a marquee innovator in our 2019
MedTech Breakthrough Awards program.”
This annual MedTech Breakthrough awards program recognizes many
innovative companies and products from across the globe. Along with the
Clinical Efficiency Innovation Award, MedTech Breakthrough also names winners
in the following categories: Best Computerized Decision Support (CDS) Solution,
Patient Engagement Innovation Award, Best Overall Healthcare Cybersecurity
Company, Best Health Network Technology Implementation, and dozens more.
About LogicStream Health:
LogicStream Health is
trusted by a community of high-performing healthcare providers across the
United States. The company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform as well as The
Drug Shortage App stand alone in their ability to help customers gain instant
insights to improve vital clinical processes and better control patient care.
As a result, hospitals and health systems reduce cost and improve outcomes.
Healthcare customers are saving millions of dollars on the LogicStream Health
platform. For more information about The Drug Shortage App, visit www.thedrugshortageapp.com.
About MedTech Breakthrough:
Part of Tech Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence and recognition platform for global technology innovation and leadership, the MedTech Breakthrough Awards program is an independent program devoted to honoring excellence in medical and health related technology companies, products, services and people. The MedTech Breakthrough Awards provide a platform for public recognition around the achievements of breakthrough health and medical companies and products in categories that include Patient Engagement, mHealth, Health & Fitness, Clinical Administration, Healthcare IoT, Medical Data, Healthcare Cybersecurity and more. For more information, visit MedTechBreakthrough.com.
April 4, 2019 – LogicStream Health recently hosted a webinar with Becker’s Hospital Review where industry experts answered important questions about trends in hospital pharmacy in 2019. They also gave advice to help hospital and health system pharmacies be as successful as possible against various challenges like drug shortages, high-cost medications and more.
Webinar topics include:
Priorities + challenges for hospital pharmacies in 2019
The worsening drug shortage crisis
Five tips to successfully manage drug shortages
Priorities + Challenges For Hospital Pharmacies in 2019
To be successful in today’s healthcare environment, health system pharmacies must prioritize efforts to address several issues simultaneously, the panelists explained. Top-of-mind topics for many pharmacies is:
Ensuring compliance of new regulations
Successfully navigating the era of declining reimbursement
Managing expenditures
The Worsening Drug Shortage Crisis
The drug shortage crisis is one of the critical demands placed on hospital leadership. Shortages occur for many reasons, including manufacturing problems, product discontinuation, a spike in demand or even drug profitability.
These factors are difficult to control, but hospital pharmacy leaders have found several hacks to proactively manage the shortages.
Five Tips to Successfully Manage the Drug Crisis
Go back to the basics. Before solving some of the more complex issues like drug shortages, ensure that the basics like time management, delegation of duties and good hiring practices are met.
Use innovative technologies. One example of a new technology is The Drug Shortage App from LogicStream Health™, which was developed to help hospital and health system pharmacies lessen the effects of drug shortages by alerting providers to potential shortages and their impact on the hospital or health system.
Educate and inform legislators. Providers should ensure they stay informed and support various regulations that will have positive effects for healthcare.
Don’t hoard products. It’s important to practice good stewardship. Hospitals and health system pharmacies shouldn’t hoard products or purchase them in abundance since it can worsen shortages.
Be vigilant when working with key stakeholders. One of the best strategies hospital pharmacies can deploy to protect the system from feeling the effects of a drug shortage is vigilance when working with key stakeholders. Having weekly internal meetings to mitigate drug shortages and meeting with purchasers can be very helpful.
Overall, pharmacy leaders have many issues to address to remain successful. However, by ensuring compliance of new regulations, staying on top of reimbursements and exercising best practices to manage drug shortages, hospital and health system pharmacies can be successful in 2019.
Panelists:
Want to learn more about LogicStream Health?
Our mission is to help clinicians improve and better control the care they deliver to every patient, every day.
LogicStream Healthis trusted by a community of high-performing healthcare providers across the United States. The company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform stands alone in its ability to help customers gain instant insights to improve vital clinical processes and better control patient care.
Customers have reduced cost and improve outcomes using LogicStream Health software. Healthcare customers are generating millions of dollars in ROI from the LogicStream Health platform, for example, by reducing high-cost medications; achieving significant reductions in CAUTI; and, reaching nearly 100% compliance with VTE protocols.
The Platform
The LogicStream Health SaaS platform complements modern EHR systems and is designed for rapid implementation and easy adoption by end-user clinicians, informaticists, data analysts, and executive teams striving to better control and manage clinical processes in near-real-time. LogicStream Health, developed by clinicians for clinicians, today is supporting hundreds of hospitals on a scalable and sustainable technology platform to standardize process and deliver highly reliable healthcare.
The Drug Shortage App from LogicStream Health™
The Drug Shortage App from LogicStream Health™ is the newest application from LogicStream Health. It helps hospital pharmacy teams with an easy-to-use, web-based solution that manages drug shortages and minimizes disruption to patient care.
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