Several new announcements show providers, including Brightside Health and Tampa General Hospital, seek to improve patient outcomes and experiences with artificial intelligence and innovative care modalities.

Technology vendors, including InterSystems, CLEAR and Innovaccer, also formed new partnerships that streamline data management, promote secure interoperability and track operational performance.

Brightside adds SUD virtual care

Brightside Health is expanding into substance use disorder care through virtual care by acquiring Lionrock Recovery and its intensive outpatient telehealth program, the company announced Wednesday.

Integrating virtual intensive outpatient service for SUD over subsequent quarters will expand Brightside's suite of telemental services, which includes treatment for anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts and alcohol use disorder, the mental health treatment provider said in a statement.

The acquisition will enable Brightside to help improve access to SUD treatment, which increased significantly beyond the onset of the opioid epidemic and through the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control said it measured 39% more SUD cases between 2018 and 2021, according to the company.

"Substance use has been catastrophic to families, communities, payers and health systems," Brad Kittredge, cofounder and CEO of Brightside Health, said in a statement.

Compounding the impact, the government did not include behavioral health absence in the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009 incentives, said Jeremy Bloom, CEO of NorthSight Recovery, a behavioral health agency in Arizona.

That "left many facilities at the back of the line for technology and funding," he told Healthcare IT News last year when the agency implemented electronic health records and began exchanging data with its health information exchange to improve care coordination and SUD access.

"By offering substance use disorder programs, we are now treating more patients with modalities designed to address specific and complex conditions, including addiction and dual diagnosis," added Dr. Mimi Winsberg, Brightside Health's cofounder and chief medical officer. 

InterSystems adds identity verification

This week, interoperability vendor InterSystems announced a new partnership with CLEAR, a secure identity company, that it said would transform patient and provider experiences. 

InterSystems said it will integrate enhanced identity verification into its Health Gateway Service in order to improve patient data-management efficiency and accuracy and make the patient check-in and preregistration processes smoother.

"Wellstar has introduced CLEAR into our patient check-in process to make confirming identity both more seamless and more secure," said Dr. Hank Capps, executive vice president and chief information and digital officer for Wellstar Health System and president of Catalyst by Wellstar, in a statement.

The integration will simplify and accelerate secure access to patients’ medical histories for the gateway service by gathering, deduplicating and aggregating patient data from national networks such as Care Quality, eHealth Exchange and CommonWell, according to InterSystems.

Beyond gaining enhanced efficiency and accuracy in data management that can result from connecting a patient’s identity to their medical history, doctors will have access to medical data from multiple clinicians and specialists. This can help them improve patient outcomes and provide more personalized care.

"CLEAR's Verified Identity technology has transformed the airport experience for millions of travelers," Don Woodlock, head of global healthcare solutions at InterSystems, noted in the announcement.

"In the same way, CLEAR’s technology combined with the InterSystems Health Gateway Service will transform the patient and provider experience through streamlining the check-in and pre-registration process for patients, immediately giving clinicians a clear and complete picture of the patient even prior to their first visit," he said.

"Through our partnership with InterSystems, we will reduce friction for both patients and providers by securely confirming your identity," Caryn Seidman Becker, CEO of CLEAR, added.

Pediatric group taps Innovaccer for VBC

Innovaccer, an AI and analytics company, announced this month that Pediatrics Associates, a national pediatric primary care and telehealth service, will use its data and population health management platform to advance analytics and workflows and accelerate its value-based care initiatives.

Pediatric Associates, the largest private pediatric primary care group in the U.S., with 1.5 million patients across seven states, will be able to create unified patient records by integrating data from electronic health records, health information exchanges and payers for a 360-degree view of patients, the company said.

Personalized, high-quality care is challenged by care coordination and a need to scale capabilities, Dr. Amanda Furr, vice president of population health at Pediatrics Associates, explained in the statement.

"We understand the value of data analytics, risk adjustment, quality gap closure and empowering pediatric clinicians to improve outcomes."

Innovaccer's AI platform provides customizable predictive analytics dashboards that track quality, risk, cost, utilization and other performance factors. It can also automate transitional care management, build patient registries, identify coding opportunities and track quality measures, the company said, noting that the EHR-agnostic application InNote promotes interoperability.

"The Innovaccer platform enhances our understanding of patient populations and helps us make accurate diagnoses, establish and automate TCM protocols and bridge care gaps," Furr added. 

"Pediatric Associates has an impressive track record in managing over 1.5 million lives across Medicaid and commercial contracts," Abhinav Shashank, cofounder and CEO at Innovaccer, said in the announcement.

Tampa General to expand use of AI

Tampa General Hospital announced on June 5 that it extended its long-term partnership with Palantir through 2032. The hospital will use the company's artificial intelligence platform to power eligibility and prioritization workflows for frontline teams, and to enhance revenue cycle management and other automation. 

The Care Coordination Operating System will encode Tampa General’s domain expertise, real-time situational awareness and large language models into decision-support tools, according to a statement. 

Tampa General will also use the AI platform analytics to assess care efficacy through a new Hospital Syncapplication suite, including AI-powered workflows for bed placement, patient itineraries and staffing allocation.

The partners, which began working together in 2021, said they expanded to more than a dozen use cases across the health system since then, which reduced patient wait times and lengths of stay. Achievements include cutting post-anesthesia care-unit holds by 28% and reducing the mean length of stay for sepsis patients by 30%.

"Less time waiting for placement and a reduced length of stay does not just enhance the patient experience, it gives us an opportunity to treat more patients that need care," said John Couris, president and CEO of Tampa General, in a statement.

"These improvements, powered by data and technology, contribute to better and more robust treatment plans, which in turn, can lead to better patient outcomes."

Tampa General began to pull data from its EHR and previously created an early warning system that guided hospital staff to decrease the hospital's sepsis early death rate from 6% to 4%, Dr. Peggy Duggan, Tampa General's executive vice president and chief medical officer, told Healthcare IT News last year.

"Our success metrics within our sepsis work focus on the overall process and not just the technology," Duggan said. "Some of our biggest successes include the activation of our robust team focused on best practice sepsis care, development of evidence-based clinical pathways for sepsis care and alignment of our order sets."

Tampa General found that, when sepsis patients received the appropriate care, their mortality rate was reduced from 23% to 7.5%. Getting that hard data also increased physician utilization of those order sets from 27% to greater than 70%, she said.

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.