Gita Afshar is president of Insight Health Solutions Inc., an East Providence-based company that makes software for the medical industry.
PBN: What exactly do you do at Insight Health Solutions?
AFSHAR: Insight Health Solutions is a risk-management and quality-improvement software company dedicated to solving the challenges of patient safety and quality of care in the health care industry. Our software products encompass the entire risk-assessment and management process in health care organizations by providing tools for reporting, reviewing and monitoring of adverse events, as well as providing managers with the ability to monitor performance of the organization and highlight areas for improvement. Our software replaces numerous paper and disparate semi-automated systems by pushing actionable information to the desktop of those who can best utilize it for the benefit of the patient and the organization.
PBN: Could you give some examples of how providers use your software?
AFSHAR: Our software applications are used in all kinds of risk-management and quality-improvement activities of health care organizations. For example, hospital staff can anonymously report risk incidents such as adverse medication events, patient falls or complaints, etc., via our software. The software then automatically alerts those who need to know of the event and initiates a review process to determine the cause of the incident. Additionally, it can pinpoint the factors that affect the organization’s performance by monitoring trends in quality indicators that can help identify and correct problems immediately prior to reaching a critical level.
PBN: How big a role do you think products like Insight’s can play in helping to control medical costs?
AFSHAR: Patient safety is a critical component of every health care discussion right now. Not only does it have a financial impact, but the impact of negative publicity and the loss of public trust plays a big role. Using our products, hospitals can identify the areas that need improvement and introduce initiatives that help increase quality to reduce cost and improve patient safety.
PBN: What impact could you see the pending health reform bills having on your company?
AFSHAR: Quality measure initiatives continue to accelerate in the health care industry, and organizations are increasingly challenged by the number of required measures, qualified staff, and methods of reporting the measures. And now organizations have to think about how they compare with facilities providing similar services, because more and more patients utilize access to resources that rate and compare them. These ratings can strongly affect a facility’s reputation, and help determine whether or not patients choose that organization as their provider.
What’s more, health care reform is here; with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 stimulus dollars are at stake, demonstrating meaningful use of technology and electronic submission of quality measures will be key indicators of eligibility for funding. For some organizations, health care reform can’t arrive too soon, while for others it’s arriving just in time. But one thing is certain: quality measure requirements can’t be ignored. Our software will assist health care organizations in gathering, aggregating and reporting the required data internally as well as externally to regulatory agencies.
PBN: Insight Health Solutions recently released a new product, RadiologyInsight. What is that?
AFSHAR: RadiologyInsight is our new peer review software application specific to hospitals’ radiology departments and free-standing radiology centers. It has been developed to automate and improve the efficiency of the diagnostic imaging quality review process required by the American College of Radiology (ACR).
This application was developed in collaboration with the radiology departments of Rhode Island Hospital and The Miriam Hospital, and was born out of their need to increase compliance with ACR requirements while minimizing disruption to the radiologists’ workflow. It randomly selects a certain percentage of radiology images that have already been interpreted, and then assigns them to a second reader who is an expert in that type of exam.
Like our quality and risk products, RadiologyInsight also identifies standard of care issues and escalates discrepant cases for investigation, and is designed to integrate with the hospital’s overall quality improvement initiatives. We launched the product at the Radiological Society of North America Conference, held in Chicago last November, and received a lot of interest from organizations that need to automate the mostly manual – and entirely cumbersome – process that they currently use. •
