2017 Annual Conference Presentations

Steven Tisdale, Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center
Tim Currie, AHEAD LLC

EPIC is at the epicenter of care delivery in most healthcare organizations. This session will provide insights from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center into the implementation and operationalization of ServiceNow’s Service Mapping for the EPIC application stack. Attendees will hear about the journey and lessons learned and also see a demo of the Service Mapping within the ServiceNow platform, by subject matter experts from AHEAD and ServiceNow.

Tom Foley, Director, Lenovo Health

Health data integrity is critical to drive a value-based delivery of care model. We often see integrity get eroded due to breaches in cyber security, duplicate records, medical identity theft and payment fraud. Eliminating these legacy challenges are necessary before a health system can achieve value; reducing cost and improving care. This session will review a path to eliminate these legacy challenges and move toward value with confidence.

Priya Sundararajan, Mission Hospital
Arun Murugesan, Mission Hospital

Healthcare is an industry known for having huge amount of data that is growing exponentially, starting from electronic health records, medical history and more. The very first step of Data Analytics would be collecting all data, which could be both structured and unstructured. Understanding the unstructured data and drawing valuable insights from the data is more complicated, which is why organizations are turning to Data Analytics tools to help them consolidate, visualize, and analyze this data. The Clinical & Business Analytics department in Mission Hospital is focused on improving health care though data-driven insight. Mission has a foundation in place to support access to large amount of data: a late-binding enterprise data warehouse platform (EDW). As a platform that aggregates clinical, financial, operational and other data, the EDW is becoming the “single source of truth” for the organization, supplying the data for an array of analytics applications.

Brian Cassel, Ph.D., Virginia Commonwealth University’s Massey Cancer Center
Lewis Broome, Impact Makers

Hear a case study from the Massey Cancer Center on utilizing a data strategy to drive their analytics program; example outcomes include gathering the data needed to make the case for creating, sustaining and expanding palliative care services. Many healthcare organizations struggle with palliative care. By using data and analytics, palliative care programs can grow and advance. This case study will highlight using analytics to improve outcomes, improve care delivery, and reduce costs. The presentation will conclude with a retrospective look at applying the newly developed HIMSS Adoption Model for Analytics Maturity (AMAM) to the Massey case study.

Timothy Reeder, Department of Emergency Medicine, Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University
Thomas Bohrmann, Roundtable Analytics, Inc.

The role of predictive analytics in healthcare has received considerable attention but for many the notion lacks real-world examples and case studies. One branch of healthcare in desperate need of analytics-driven insights is emergency medicine, society’s healthcare safety net responsible for providing unscheduled care for our sickest patients. In this session we focus on how predictive analytics is used today to prospectively identify what management changes are needed to create efficient and cost-effective EDs. Our study site, Vidant Medical Center in Greenville, NC, houses three separate emergency care centers: a large Level I trauma center, a pediatric ED and a minor ED. We discuss how simulation modeling has become an accessible analytics technology for physicians, nurses and administrators at Vidant as they consider two management interventions: a major overhaul of their nurse staffing model and how best to manage a costly treatment area renovation.

Salim Saiyed, MD, CaroMont Health
Hear the story after implementation of how this impacted both patient safety and clinician engagement.

Marya Upchurch, Blaze Advisors, LLC
John Meier, MD, WakeMed Key Community Care
Mike Rhoades, Blaze Advisors, LLC

In the business of population health, many providers are struggling to see a return on investment or a clear path forward for a sustainable value-based care system. This session will cover key technology, programmatic, and financial challenges facing accountable care organizations (ACOs) as well as lessons learned at an ACO in the journey thusfar. Through the evaluation of the current data integration path and market changes (MACRA/MIPS), the ACO pivoted aligning its infrastructure to meet the needs of the current marketplace and financial reality. As a result, this ACO was able to significantly reduce population health capital and operating expenditures (without deleteriously impacting clinical outcomes) with a targeted data strategy and shared risk model. The transformed entity is a much more sustainable ACO able to adapt to changing regulatory, payer, and clinical requirements.

Janakiraman Pandian, Mission Health
Arun Murugesan, Mission Health

Data Analytics in the healthcare Industry is the “aorta” to a Clinical Decision-Support System. This approach has benefits in different forms such as better outcomes in diagnoses, treatment, follow-up treatment, high quality care at lower cost, and less time involved in treating a patient. Care-Process Models (CPMs) that readily expose errors and improve care delivery repetition were put together by Mission Health, with one such CPM designed for Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) patient cohort. AKI is the loss of renal function resulting in an increase in blood urea nitrogen or creatinine and may result in potentially life-threatening complications. The complexities in provision of care involved in treating the AKI patient cohort is very minimal when a Data Analytics approach was employed in the conceptual framework of CPM; it not only metamorphosed the quality of care but also helped the Clinical Department make informed decisions, addressing privacy issues by limiting the data hand-off among related staffs.

Christie Burris, NC Health Information Exchange Authority
Mark Dunnagan, SAS Institute
Brent Lamm, UNC Health Care

Nearly a decade has passed since the HITECH Act incentivized states to build health information exchanges (HIEs) on the promise of better outcomes, improved care, and reduction of costs driven by interoperability between health care IT systems. Despite excellent examples of HIEs sprinkled across the country, interoperability has largely failed to live up to its promise at the state and national levels. HIEs that survived have formed around hospitals and health care delivery networks where there are a critical mass of patients and business interests to support the investment in HIE. And while these health care ecosystems flourish, a sizeable population of providers and patients that represent rural ambulatory clinics, FQHCs, and behavioral and public health are left without the access that other health care communities have come to expect. Enter NC HealthConnex, North Carolina’s state-operated Health Information Exchange. NC HealthConnex will serve as a public utility chartered with collecting the clinical information for state-paid health care services and connecting all providers to provide access to a citizen’s entire health record. The panel will discuss the challenges of HIE in North Carolina, the legislative mandate, and how NC HealthConnex will bridge the gap between health care ecosystems and underserved populations.

Beverly Boarts , Himformatics
Hope Daugherty, Onslow Memorial Hospital
Jo Malfitano, Onslow Memorial Hospital

By mid-2017, a majority of healthcare providers will undoubtedly be engaged in achieving one of the paths outlined in the MACRA regulations for the Transition Year. A majority of ECs are focused on the MIPS program and whether you are a clinician hoping to avoid a penalty or achieve additional incentives, 2018 is right around the corner, and with it comes changes to the current category requirements, and inclusion of a new category on Cost (Resource Utilization). How can you prepare today for tomorrow when the equation for success under MIPS changes? The goal of our presentation is to walk thru the current roadmap and decisions clients have made to meet 2017, while preparing for 2018.

Pamela Duncan, Wake Forest Baptist Health
Scott Rushing, Wake Forest School of Medicine Public Health Sciences
Rica Abbott, Wake Forest Baptist Health

The COMPASS Study is a Patient-Centered Research Outcomes Institute pragmatic, cluster-randomized trial of 41 hospitals in North Carolina designed to determine the effectiveness of comprehensive models of coordinated post-acute stroke care. The COMPASS care model is consistent with Center for Medicare and Medicaid Service’s (CMS) value-based care models for management of patients with complex needs, and require care coordination, development of a care plan for complex patients, beneficiary engagement for self-management, and shared decision making. Individualized care plans must be available to all patients and health providers to manage care coordination and optimize the patient’s ability to manage their own health and independence. As part of the COMPASS trial, a Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center interdisciplinary team is solving the barriers to chronic care management with an interoperable electronic application, eCOMPASS for Health, a patient-centered electronic application that captures the social and functional determinants of an individual’s health and their goals of care at the point of clinical care. eCOMPASS is easily scalable and will provide opportunities for health systems to integrate care across the delivery system.

Sulaiman Sulaiman, iMethods

When it comes to Healthcare IT, historically we tend to lag-behind. We may claim many excuses – safety, cost, being risk adverse, whatever the reasons may be, healthcare IT has struggled to lead the way when it comes to innovation and change. Care across the country is still fragmented, patients are going to ten different portals to piece together their story, quality of care has a great potential for improvement, efficiency and cost of care continues to hamper our economy, workflows are cumbersome, asking people to do tasks that are irrelevant to their role (just ask physicians) is contributing to caregiver burnout, and much more. This presentation shares a global view of how innovation is transforming care in certain areas and where we need to do more. Is IoT, Analytics, Medical device technology, Wearables, helping us connect more? What do our patients and consumers think? Are we consumed by the politics of healthcare? Is regulation adding a burden that it difficult to manage? How effective are we? Where do we need to focus? Let’s make sure disruption in healthcare is creating value, not only chaos.

Martin Sizemore, Wake Forest Baptist Health

The landscape of clinical informatics is changing and demanding the integration of external sources of data to inform clinical decision-making. An example is the integration of air quality data with the incidence of asthma and asthma-related ER visits. In addition, there is a need for broad detailed data collection for specialized care taken from the patient in the waiting room that the clinician does have time to capture during the visit but could aid in decision-making. How are these questionnaires developed, the data validated and yet kept simple for a typical patient? The use of patient-generated data is both needed but questioned by clinicians. In the past, we had to know a question to build business intelligence solution, but today clinicians want to examine the data, determine a direction to investigate and, in many cases, have a conversation with the data. This new approach can yield innovative improvements to care protocols, understanding of disease states or identification of groups of patients with similar disease progression.

Patty Lewis, RHIT, Coastal Connect HIE
Karon Casey, Coastal Connect HIE

Public Health is instrumental in providing services that impact population health in our state. Located in Southeastern North Carolina, the Pender County Health Department operates with the mission of “building a healthier tomorrow”. Their services support the well-being of mothers, infants, and children in the county, with one of the key services providing prenatal care. The hospital located in Pender County does not deliver babies, instead the deliveries occur at the hospital in the neighboring county, New Hanover. The current workflow is for patient records to be faxed to the delivering hospital on Friday for all maternity patients who have reached 38 weeks in the event they deliver over the weekend.

Clyde Hewitt, CynergisTek
Chuck Kesler, Duke Health

During 2016, the healthcare industry experienced a proliferation of new cyberattack vectors. Hackers are changing their approach to exploit new technologies, exploit immature controls, and look for ways to rapidly monetize their successes. Many healthcare providers are discovering that traditional back-office security controls are not adequate to address these emerging threats. The security culture is a critical control and is often overlooked. As budgets are squeezed, it is important for everyone to understand that technology cannot defeat hackers without buy-in from all levels of management. We will provide guidance on strategy that will include how to enhance security architecture and mitigate controls, as well as practical tips on how to improve security posture and program effectiveness.

Jeff Fuller, UNC Health Care
Jason Glovier, UNC Health Care

Enterprise Analytics and Data Sciences (EADS) is a new department at UNC using an innovative operating model and new technologies to create a place where our world-class care can be driven by insights gained through our enhanced capabilities of data and analytics. This session will demonstrate how a large healthcare system realized a vision for becoming a data-driven organization by adopting advanced analytics as a strategic imperative to support value-based healthcare. Discussions will include how we uniquely addressed the need to adopt advanced analytics at the system level by implementing an operating model built on new disciplines of Solution Management and advanced analytics development leveraging the Agile framework. We will focus specifically on how we are using our new operating model to rapidly solve a strategic clinical operations challenge of maximizing capacity in the Inpatient wards through optimizing room turnover to increase throughput.

Leeann Garms, Raleigh Neurology Associates, P.A.

Engaged patients can significantly impact the value of the healthcare they receive. An engaged, empowered patient is an integral part of the care team, providing a source of valuable information and feedback and playing an active role in the care that they receive from others on their care team. In this talk, Leeann will share her insights and experiences developing and implementing patient engagement strategies designed to deliver positive outcomes for the patient, their care givers and care teams.

Lesli Adams, Oracle Corporation

The current healthcare delivery landscape is changing dramatically. Major regulatory reimbursement models are evolving from fee for service to fee for outcomes and value. This shift requires health systems to leverage actionable patient outcome and cost analytics, as well as manage several other constraining challenges to address value base contracting, quality measure performance, and internal cost and care team effectiveness. To ensure that patient care uses the right guideline and the right utilization of service, with the right access to care without delay, deft organizations with agnostic analytic strategies should aggregate their enterprise data once and employ data governance to control variability. In this way, these organizations will be more prepared for the inevitable changes in the future by employing nimble and flexible capabilities that can help them to meet the unpredictable legislation ahead. Join our conversation about the next generation of healthcare analytics that supports your organization’s population health, revenue cycle, care transformation, and clinical decision support activities.

Kathy Downing, AHIMA IGAdvisors

The revenue cycle is both the front end and back end of the patient health experience. Unfortunately, revenue cycle processes are often not standardized, or when standardized, not followed consistently by staff. The opportunities for improvement within the revenue cycle are vast and trustworthy information and standardized defined processes are crucial to making the improvements necessary to ensure excellence. This presentation will provide an overview of information governance for healthcare, including industry initiatives that are driving the need to ensure trustworthy information; current barriers resulting from silo’d decisions around information; key components of information governance program; and the competitive advantage that a formal information governance program will give a healthcare organization. In addition, the presentation will focus on how information governance will ensure revenue cycle excellence through real-world examples of revenue cycle challenges.

Daniel O’Malley, University of Virginia Health System

The use of data, like many processes in healthcare and other industries, tends to follow a maturity progression path from basic, operationally-based, retrospective metrics to advanced, strategically-focused, prospective decision-making. The journey toward data use maturity requires support and an advanced data infrastructure that increasingly must deliver real-time analysis. Certain skills and expertise are needed to facilitate business units and service lines along this path and to support their increasingly complex data requests. This requires an increasingly close collaboration and a partnership between the service lines and the data production pipeline. Examine how the University of Virginia Health System is tackling this problem to create an agile analytics capability.