SYNCRONYS eNewsletter – September 2022 

   SYNCRONYS’ 6^TH ANNUAL HIE USERS CONFERENCE

SYNCRONYS hosted its 6^th Annual HIE Users Conference in September with the theme Better Data. Better Health Equity.  The conference kicked off with a featured presentation by Dr. David Scrase, Cabinet Secretary, New Mexico Human Services Department, and Acting Cabinet Secretary for the New Mexico Department of Health.  It is no secret our beautiful state of New Mexico ends up on the wrong end of many national lists and Dr. Scrase’s presentation utilized many forms of data to confirm in the area of health equity, for much of our population, it is no different.

Following Dr. Scrase, was a host of presenters and panelists highlighting the work currently underway to change the trajectory for New Mexico, including how the HIE can support New Mexico’s goals, the analytic use cases and training approach work being done, along with improving patient care, closing gaps in care, as well as looking at future use cases and transition risk management related to Population Health and Health Equity.  The second day of the conference brought information shared on Community Based Programs and Closed Loop Referrals, including how Idaho has aligned their HIE to further support health equity. Also highlighted was the work the New Mexico Alliance of Health Councils is gearing up to achieve, and a presentation from Dr. Nadia Fazel on how SYNCRONYS supports the unhoused population in Albuquerque which has reduced search time for physicians by at least 50% with the information at their fingertips in the HIE.  Additional current use case information was highlighted related to Substance Use Disorder, Collaboration and Coordination of Mental Health, Real-Time Network Collaboration on patient status, and the Hepatitis C Use Case.  Day two concluded with data RS21 Health Lab is creating to identify specific areas, even neighborhoods, where inequity is more prevalent and how SYNCRONYS will move forward in the areas of Data, Security and Sustainability, making the HIE even better, through data, than it is today.

We could not have put on such a successful and well attended conference without the generosity of our sponsors, including Molina Healthcare, Orion Health, Presbyterian, Western Sky Community Care, BlueCross BlueShield of New Mexico, Collective Medical, and others, we thank each of them for trusting us to create a meaningful and no-charge conference for our users.

Our Newest Partnerships 

SYNCRONYS is pleased to announce our newest partnership, Presbyterian has agreed to share images from each of their nine hospitals across New Mexico.

Additionally, we have signed contracts (awaiting connectivity) with seven new organizations, including Roadrunner Hospice and the City of Santa Fe Fire Department.

Four organizations have been fully onboarded to the HIE and this is in addition to conducting training for eighteen healthcare organizations.  It has been a very busy quarter for SYNCRONYS.

The SYNCRONYS Solutions

As we head into the final months of 2022, and keeping our Better Data, Better Health Equity theme in mind, it is a great opportunity to take a look at the solutions SYNCRONYS offers for clients.

Point of Care and Collaboration Solutions.

Clinical information at the point of care improves care quality by enabling access to more accurate and up-to-date information on patients, reducing medical errors and improving appropriateness of care, specifically during transitions of care.  Through the SYNCRONYS clinical portal stakeholders will access a patient’s longitudinal clinical record with encounter history, medication lists and fill data, lab test, radiological images, Hepatitis C identification and management tools, and the Medical Orders for Scope of Treatment (MOST) and Advanced Directives forms for making health care decisions, typically in end-of-life care situations.

Additional point-of care solutions include secure messaging and collaboration tools. Direct Secure Messaging (DSM) permits users to exchange clinical (or medical) information with other providers and healthcare facilities, specifically referrals and patients notes, efficiently and securely.  With DSM, clinicians send authenticated health information to known and trusted recipients, creating an improved coordination of care amongst organizations, providers, and patients.  The SYNCRONYS Collaboration Solutions are designed to obtain current health care data during key transitions of care when the patient is admitted to the Emergency Department (ED) or transferred post-discharge to an after-care facility. For ED admissions, the patient’s previous history is obtained and transmitted back to the ED staff for real time patient updates, with specific targeted notifications of medications and tests, safety/security events and previous ED utilization. Collaboration is achieved with ambulatory treating physicians and care team members who are notified of the ED visit and upload and share pertinent documents and communicate real-time. Specific targeted use cases involve mental health and substance abuse ED admissions. For post-discharge transitions of care Medication Assisted Treatment facilities are identified, Skilled Nursing Facilities are provided the hospital’s discharge plan and collaborative inpatient care insights, and ambulatory treating providers are notified to schedule timely follow-up. These collaborative solutions improve clinical care for a patient during and after the ED visit or inpatient hospitalization, decrease duplicative tests and imaging, reduce unnecessary inpatient admissions or re-admissions, reduce complication rates through smoother transitions, and ensure timely follow-up and knowledge transfer between care teams.

Population Health Analytics and Risk Assessment Solutions.

SYNCRONYS’ population health analytics and risk assessment solutions provide the ability for clinicians, in both inpatient and outpatient settings, to review critical clinical information across the population.  Identifying key areas of risk and opportunity based on cost, ED and inpatient utilization, mortality, acute events, and chronic conditions by specific diagnosis or diagnosis group, for the present timeframe (compared to KPIs if provided) and for future risk.  The population, event, condition, and individual risk stratification is based on clinical data, utilization, social determinants of health as well as claims data. The future risk can be assessed for the general population or specific populations, defined by multiple filters, combinations of events and/or conditions, and/or transition risk of an inpatient or ED readmission. The risk level is based on the risk level in 30 and/or 90 days and identifies when the risk level has changed. The analytics also provides filters to identify patients with new diagnoses. All analytics are available to drill down to a list of targeted patients and then into the individual patient profile with multiple variables providing a weight of importance to each variable.

The Hospital Performance Reports and Cost and Utilization Performance Reports allows the clinician to focus on specific variables. For example, the Hospital Performance Report provides statistics vs KPIs for the last 12 months for inpatient (IP) 30-day readmission rate, IP average length of stay, IP mortality rate, IP sepsis rate, ED 30-day readmission rate, and ED average length of stay (ALOS). Multiple filters such as targeted diagnoses are available to refine the search, and the opportunity costs all are risk adjusted by the individual patient to account for sicker patients.

Multiple filters are available to easily refine the search for data and analytical insights which allow clinicians to focus on their health care priorities and accurately identify the best targets (patients, conditions, providers) for improving overall patient health and decreasing inappropriate utilization. Doctors, nurses, other clinicians use this to design, review outcomes, and improve outreach/care management/ population health programs in all settings.

Quality of Care Monitoring and Reporting.

SYNCRONYS’ solution for quality-of-care management provides the ability for clinicians to drill down to a patient’s quality gaps in care in a variety of ways to meet the patient’s specific needs.  The individual patient profile found within the Spotlight Analytics Dashboards includes key targeted Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) measures that apply to the patient, listing those compliant and not compliant, including the last compliant date, enabling the clinician to focus on the “care gaps” during any patient visit. Under the Quality Measures Performance Reports, the “care gaps” are summarized by the organization, providing an organizational rate across all measures and by measure, which can be filtered by line of business, primary care provider (PCP) group and primary care provider, enabling clinical leaders to drill down to measures and clinicians not meeting targets.  HBI Solutions is a National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) certified software vendor, making the HEDIS rates accurate based on the SYNCRONYS data.  HEDIS measures are updated on a real time basis with the ingestion of new data.

Community Insights + Strategic Planning Solutions.

SYNCRONYS is working with RS21 Health Labs to develop enriched data analytics tools providing a statewide view of Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) and key population indicators.  This enriched data can be layered onto population segments with their corresponding healthcare utilization to be used for strategic planning, trending, and performance monitoring. Visualization of this enriched data will provide a holistic approach to improving outcome-based performance, as well as support more accurate and timely evidence-based decision-making in strategic planning, performance monitoring, trend analysis and healthcare delivery.

The Community Insight Explorer provides geospatial analysis with various visualization layers of SDOH data, population indicators and important state-level performance metrics to allow stakeholders to explore the HIE data at regional level and understand what key drivers of cost and outcomes are, how they are related to SDOH factors, and where the issues are most prevalent requiring intervention.  By discovering the patterns and influencing social factors, stakeholders will have a better understanding on the effects on the population and their health needs.

In addition to the Community Insight Explorer, SYNCRONYS and RS21 has deployed a Telehealth Dashboard providing a way to track utilization of telehealth across the state to help form long-term telehealth strategies.

SYNCRONYS is working to align the interests of all Health Information Exchange (HIE) stakeholders (payers, providers, governmental agencies) by enhancing the tools offered through the HIE and improving access to health information. SYNCRONYS is committed to providing outcome-oriented solutions that improve access to health information by creating opportunities for better informed patient care through solutions that enable stakeholders to improve care coordination, quality in care, healthcare outcomes, and reduce cost within the healthcare ecosystem.

News around the nation. 

September 18, 2022 – the following was written by Hyland, published through HIMSS, and highlights the same goals and challenges, as well as achievements, that are true today for SYNCRONYS and other healthcare/HIE organizations in the US and around the world.  Additional it aligns nicely with our conference health equity theme.

Improving interoperability in healthcare will enhance the services delivered by clinicians, ultimately leading to better patient outcomes. It delivers secure access and integration of electronic health data so it can be used to optimize health outcomes. By bringing together patient information from multiple trusted sources, healthcare providers and patients will have greater visibility of accurate information that leads to better decisions, which in turn leads to better outcomes.

The importance of interoperability in healthcare has been clear for some time – and is only gaining importance in Australia and around the world.

Australia is continually working towards open data policies that create an environment for interoperability, and use of data assets as a national resource. However, although progress has been made, there are still obstacles in the way of connected care.

These obstacles are complex and varied but include how to best manage unstructured patient data and content and how to integrate data from multiple EHR systems. Additionally, healthcare organizations are challenged with integrating new solutions with existing software solutions or legacy systems as well as addressing clinician and staff resistance to adopting new solutions into existing workflows.  While these barriers need to be overcome, one thing is clear: Access to crucial patient content must be improved if we are to meet tomorrow’s standard of patient care.

The ONC Health Interoperability Outcomes 2030 survey found consensus among providers that interoperability is a top priority, with goals of integrating patient data from inside and outside the system and combining clinical and administrative data to support patient care and business applications. This is a view that is widely reflected in Australia as well as around the globe.

The industry has backed this interest with significant investment: The global healthcare interoperability solutions market – at $2.9 billion in 2021 – is projected to reach $5.7 billion by 2026, according to Markets and Markets forecast for Healthcare Interoperability Solutions.

The 2022 State of Connected Care Survey conducted by HIMSS Market Insights details that healthcare leaders are looking to implement interoperability improvements. The survey found that 67% of respondents are currently using, piloting or planning to integrate point-of-care imaging and workflows. While this is a step in the right direction, the fundamental issue remains – information is often stored in siloes and interoperability can only be achieved with enterprise solutions like Vendor Neutral Archives (VNA) that can store data in its original format. Access to medical images and patient records, enhances clinician ability to make informed decisions for improved patient outcomes. 

Why is interoperability in healthcare important?

Patient information, like all information in the global datasphere, is exploding. The driving force for this is the proliferation of capture devices (like mobile phones) and the sophistication of video and jpeg formats. The total volume of patient data is growing in terms of total volume, but it is also becoming more complex, diverse, and larger.  More information can provide deeper insights, but it also creates challenges in securely ingesting, sorting, normalizing, classifying, and analyzing it to make it useful in a timely manner.

This is particularly true with images, where the object and metadata need to be stored separately. It is also critical with AI, where some information needs to be anonymized. As data grows, so does the importance of securely integrating and exchanging health information to ensure complete information for care decisions.

Respondents to the HIMSS Market Insights survey cited obstacles to connected care including integrating data that is siloed in multiple EHRs, managing unstructured content and systems integrations.

In healthcare, patient information is often fragmented across specialties, locked inside systems or inaccessible from within a core system. EMRs or EHRs – regarded as the central store for patient information – don’t always handle unstructured information like point of care medical images and clinician notes well. They may provide some connection but not store, manage, and retrieve. Often the file types are changed – storing as PDFs for example may result in losing its qualitative value. PACS imaging technology, software that typically supports only radiology or cardiology departments, ties clinicians to proprietary workstations and requires manual steps to share imaging with hospitals and others, causing delays and interfering in valuable collaboration.

The need for connected care

Even within a single health system, staff may take manual, time consuming steps to extract and share information. A classic example is the “CD workflow” where radiology burns imaging studies on CDs for delivery to another department. When information is difficult to access, it creates inefficiency and inconvenience for patients and providers while also creating delays in treatment.

Access to unstructured information becomes an even bigger challenge when a patient travels outside their home system. Imaging, reports, and test results conducted at one facility may be instrumental for informing decisions at another. In addition, today’s patients are also wanting access to their medical information.

When information can be easily and securely shared, collaborators can also tap into a network of colleagues and cross-functional teams to deepen insights and share knowledge.

The ability to share information also avoids the expense and inconvenience of a patient having to repeat imaging or testing simply because their information cannot be shared with another organization or health system.

While the case for secure access to a more complete patient record is clear, the path to get there isn’t always straightforward.  

The future of healthcare interoperability solutions

Many healthcare organizations aim to centralize and streamline access to important content in clinical and administrative functions. Progress is being made, but it isn’t always a smooth journey – and the quest isn’t diminishing. The obstacles remain whereby many departments, for example radiology, run their own application environment with data housed in silos. Furthermore, there’s often an emotional reluctance at the department level to move away from what’s in place today.  IT needs executive support for a top-down move towards enterprise systems and to figure out a compelling case for change, with strong change management planning.  Therefore, it’s internal resistance and the distributed data that’s holding this up.

The recent HIMSS Market Insight survey shows that three-quarters of respondents expect to purchase a connected care platform. They are also deciding what information is most important to exchange and weighing which technologies will have significant impact on efficiency.

                       

If you would like more information about items in our newsletter or any other solution SYNCRONYS provides, please contact us at info@syncronys.org, and our website is always open at syncronys.org.