The world of medicine is moving quickly to electronic health records, mobile apps and health information exchanges. But how the back end of these systems are to be used – analysis of the data as a health care tool – are still in development.
A New York company, CipherHealth LLC, has developed a product, CipherVoice, that works as a patient follow-up platform to help hospitals improve coordination of care, reduce readmissions, and increase patient satisfaction.
The firm is looking to expand into Rhode Island. Providence Business News asked Ellen Rich, the vice president of marketing for CipherHealth, to share her view on the opportunities for CipherHealth products to improve health outcomes in Rhode Island.
PBN: CipherHealth has developed a product, CipherVoice, which promises to reduce hospital readmissions and improve patient satisfaction. How does it work?
RICH: CipherVoice, is a patient follow-up platform that helps hospitals improve the coordination of care, increase patient satisfaction and reduce readmissions.
CipherVoice follows up with 100 percent of patients within 48 hours of discharge using automated, interactive communications.
CipherVoice identifies patients that are prime for clinical and service recovery and notifies the hospital in real-time. Hospital staff is empowered to reach out to those patients that need help. They can offer clinical support and address patient satisfaction issues for those targeted patients, helping improve transitions of care without having to take on the full workload and redundant tasks associated with manual follow-up.
The question becomes: How can a hospital effectively and cost-efficiently follow-up with 100 percent of its patients? Some hospitals have nursing staff conduct follow-up. However, manual nurse follow-up is often a hit or miss process, fraught with operational and financial challenges. Calling takes a tremendous amount of time away from hospital staff due to the amount of callbacks needed.
A hospital’s obligation to a patient no longer ends when the patient leaves its four walls. Given these circumstances, the need for systematic post-discharge follow-up is clear.
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PBN: You are reported to be considering entering the Rhode Island market. What makes Rhode Island an attractive potential target to grow your business?
RICH: Stats. Although Rhode Island has a relativity small population of about 1 million in 2010, according to the U.S. Census, the 11 hospitals that provide emergency room care saw about 500,000 visits for 2009. Overall, these same hospitals provided around 730,000 outpatient visits. As inpatient stays get shorter, most patients need extended homecare once they are discharged from the hospital.
The obligation of a hospital no longer ends when the patient is discharged. In talking with many hospital CEOs and Chief Nursing Officers across the country, the time and resource constraints are very real when it comes to patient discharge follow-up care. This is part of the reason why we are so passionate about our product.
The key is creating a culture shift within a hospital, making post-discharge follow-up as much a part of care as setting up an IV. We have found that if a hospital is willing to change its approach following patient discharge the results can be dramatic and quickly realized.
PBN: Quality Partners of Rhode Island has been involved in trying to address hospital readmissions through a coaching process. How would your product complement their ongoing efforts?
RICH: As you know, Quality Partners of Rhode Island is recognized nationally as a leader in health care quality improvement. They help both government and private health care organizations to improve the quality of services delivered to their patients. They also serve as the Medicare Quality Improvement Organization for Rhode Island under a contract with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Quality Partners coach hospital staff how to best address continuing care after discharge which helps extend the clinical services to patients.
Working with the Care Transitions Intervention model, hospitals encourage patients and their caregivers to assert a more active role during care transitions. Hospital staff visit patients and perform follow up calling upon discharge. They actively coach patients on meeting their health goals, estimate progress being made and ensuring that patient needs are being met.
Although CipherHealth does not directly offer clinical care to patients, we can extend this process after staff phone calls have been made. Our program can extend the reach of patient contact and continue to identify patients at risk needing immediate clinical intervention.
For example, readmissions were reduced 40 percent for targeted patients in a client CHF program. Currently we are reaching more than 1,000 Emergency Room patients a week that enables a client ER patient relations representative to increase effectiveness 10-fold by calling at-risk patients that need help. We see our product extending the reach of Quality Partners by hospital staff.
PBN: From a data standpoint, what are the advantages of CipherVoice? How will it interface with electronic health record systems and health information exchanges?
RICH: Our company was founded through the indirect efforts of a relationship we have with a health information exchange here in New York. We’re very focused on the importance of secure patient data integration for the sake of improving care everywhere.
CipherVoice is product that offers a secure and highly capable cloud-based solution, built on infrastructure that scales to meet the most demanding situations.
CipherVoice addresses hospital clinical and service recovery, patient satisfaction and re-admissions. The platform uses pre-recorded human voices and intelligent call scripts based on hospital and department requirements. Follow-up calls are made to 100 percent of discharged patients within 24 to 48 hours after discharge.
Clinical staff is relieved of redundant phone tasks, enabling them in real-time to target at-risk patients with a customized solution supporting continuous improvement.
Using our innovative application development framework, we’re able to deploy a fully tailored solution for new customers in a matter of days. All data is stored in a HIPAA compliant manner. We provide in-app analytics and reporting functions for all the clinicians and administrators using our system, to enable them to clearly see the results.
We also work with HIE’s and EMR systems to bridge data with our system, so that critical patient information is available in the right hands at the right time, and with minimal manual intervention.
PBN: What other kinds of business applications for health care is CipherHealth investigating?
RICH: There are really too many to count. It’s funny that for the amount of attention patients get when they’re in the hospital, that attention almost drops to nothing once they take one step out of the hospital. As we mentioned before, there’s a lot of amazing patient follow-up programs, but the majority are focused on, and rightfully so, the very sickest patients.
The question to ask is: Can all patients benefit from post discharge follow-up? From what we’ve seen, we believe the answer is yes. Our customers have found that all discharged patients can benefit from follow-up or help with their care transitions. That’s why we’re beginning to pilot our technology in Home Health Care as well as with primary care physicians and large physician practices. These are areas where we can help “pull” patients into vocalizing that they need help – and “push” home health resources and primary care physicians towards the specific patients that need the most help and support.
