LogicStream Health CMIO Joins Panel Discussions at Becker’s Hospital Review Health IT and Revenue Cycle Conference

Tag Archive: Clinical process improvement

1. LogicStream Health CMIO Joins Panel Discussions at Becker’s Hospital Review Health IT and Revenue Cycle Conference

   October 9, 2019 9:59 am Leave a Comment

   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 visit www.LogicStreamHealth.com.

2. Elsevier and LogicStream Health to Deliver Nurse Documentation Optimization Solutions

   August 8, 2019 8:48 am Leave a Comment

   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.”

   Please visit these links for more information about LogicStream Health’s Clinical Process Improvement and Control Software Solutions and Elsevier Care Planning.

   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.

   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.

   ⁱ Quantifying and Visualizing Nursing Flowsheet Documentation Burden in Acute and Critical Care, Sarah Collins, RN PhD, et al, AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2018; 2018: 348–357, published online 2018 Dec 5.

3. Analytics Boost Clinical Best Practices At Tampa General Hospital

   October 15, 2018 1:16 pm Leave a Comment

   

    

   A recent article in Healthcare IT covers how Tampa General Hospital used analytics to boost use of clinical best practices. Clinicians reduced one specific test order from roughly 90 per month to five – helping with antimicrobial stewardship along the way. 

   Tampa General Hospital was experiencing difficulty accessing analytics on orders and process workflows. Any information had to come from a custom report which took days to produce. Data wasn’t easily accessible and sometimes led to more questions which put the same time-consuming cycle in motion.

   This process placed an enormous burden on the business intelligence team. They had to endlessly produce report after report so that staff could continue improving hospital quality.

   

   PROPOSAL

   The ultimate goal was to improve sepsis protocol compliance and identify and eliminate outdated order sets in seconds rather than days or weeks.

   Doctor Peter Chang, MD, Chief Medical Informatics Officer at Tampa General Hospital, and his team decided to accomplish this with the help of LogicStream Health’s analytics software.

   MEETING THE CHALLENGE

   Tampa General uses the analytics software primarily for clinical process improvement.

   With the software, staff can delve into ordering and workflow patterns and review data in near-real time. This improves lagging outcomes by implementing and managing process measure best practices.

   Multiple staff departments can also use a utilization management program in the software to track ordering and alerting trends. For example, order sets can be ranked based on use frequency and engage with clinicians to minimize variability around best practices.

   SEPSIS

   Analytics software helped Tampa General comply with sepsis protocols.

   The analytics software built a patient population based on a sepsis alert order built into the EHR. This population helps staff analyze how well clinical alerts were followed and if the correct orders were used.

   LogicStream Health software also helps staff see individual response rates to clinical alerts. This identifies those who accept and react to alerts and those who ignore them. This provides staff with information to council clinicians, refine alerts, prevent alert fatigue and minimize workflow disruption.

   ORDER SETS

   The analytics software helped Tampa General identify and eliminate outdated order sets.

   Even if an order set is published, clinical care and guidelines can certainly change over time. Tampa General uses LogicStream to review the most popular order sets and analyze the ordering patterns from those order sets.

   They are also are able to examine order sets that are not frequently used and decide if the order sets should be modified or removed from production. Currently, Tampa General is in the process of developing a review structure across all specialties to help us expediently reach our quality goals. This feat wouldn’t have been possible just a couple of years ago.

   RESULTS

   The number of test orders decreased from roughly 90 per month to 5 per month, and the C. diff rate decreased by 50 percent in one month.

   Tampa General saw a significant increase in usage of the sepsis order set and compliance with orders placed. Clinicians are also responding to alerts in a timely manner. This prevents septic patients from developing severe sepsis, creating a decline in sepsis mortality.

   LogicStream Health also helped the hospital improve quality with Clostridium difficile (C. diff). Tampa General first identified and eliminated multiple versions of the C. diff order set. This allowed them to standardize the workflow very quickly and ensure appropriate lab test utilization.

   Finally, the software supports Tampa General’s antimicrobial stewardship efforts, since clinicians no longer are ordering antibiotics for false-positive cases.

   

4. Hospitals Already Have the Key Tool Needed to Reach Zero HAIs

   October 5, 2018 2:59 pm Leave a Comment

   The Problem

   Hospitals have declared zero tolerance for healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), and they already have the key tool to do it. However, it has become a massive problem to address.

   Recently published in Fierce Healthcare, Dr. Brita Hansen, LogicStream Health Chief Medical Officer, weighs in on the healthcare-associated infections. She notes how some plague health systems and create major consequences for any who haven’t yet determined reduction solutions.

   

   One of the most pressing problems regarding healthcare-associated infections is the implications they have on patients. HAIs such as Clostridium difficile (C. diff) and catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs) result in 7% of hospitalized patients at any time. They are responsible for about 30% of patients in intensive care units acquiring at least one HAI, according to the World Health Organization. CAUTI is one of the most problematic, accounting for more than 30% of HAIs, costing health systems about $500 million annually in treatment costs. Medicare also withholds reimbursements from hospitals within a certain high-HAI quartile, and doesn’t reimburse for other HAIs.

   The Solution

   Dr. Hansen recognized the immensity of this problem, but also knows that there are solutions hidden within a tool that hospitals already use: their electronic health records (EHRs). There are five specific areas that health systems can and should improve upon if they want to see true progress towards zero HAIs.

   Five focus areas

   1. Streamline workflows. Removing unnecessary variation in the way care is delivered to ensure clinicians follow the best clinical practices. EHR systems can be leveraged to remind clinical staff that a patient has a catheter and suggest they remove it or document why it is still indicated.

   2. Stop overtesting. Hospital staff too often overtest for infections when there are not strong clinical reasons to expect an infection. Use EHR systems to ensure care processes are aligned with current testing guidelines and workflow best practices. That will produce even bigger improvements.

   3. Focus on best practices. Getting CAUTI rates to zero means clinicians should set strict rules for testing and focus on the correct insertion, maintenance and removal of catheters. Modifications such as improving catheter protocols ensure clinician focus on best practices throughout the care-delivery continuum.

   4. Minimize patient risk of infection. Whether it’s overuse of catheters or antibiotics, more rigorous hospital workflows can minimize infection risk. Many hospitals and health systems still have multidisciplinary teams performing retroactive chart reviews of HAI cases. Rather than reviewing past cases, EHRs can even be set up to proactively make recommendations for clinicians.

   5. Improve infection controls. Once an infection is identified in a timely fashion, hospitals need consistent procedures to stop it from spreading. Those should include isolating the patient, clinicians wearing special gowns and gloves, special hand-washing procedures and, crucially, communicating those standards to staff.

   

   About Dr. Brita Hansen: Brita Hansen, M.D., is chief medical officer of LogicStream Health. Prior to joining LogicStream, Dr. Hansen served as chief health information officer at Hennepin County Medical Center. She is also an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine.