Escape the Black-hole of Healthcare Information

Improve Patient Care Results Through the Entire Care Continuum with Quality Data

Hospitals and emergency departments today face a care conundrum. What happens to their patients once they’re discharged from their facility can often feel like passing the event horizon of an information black-hole. The inability to see granular details beyond a patient’s release into post-acute care, even with the best of health information exchanges, can often lead to expensive readmission penalties, subpar patient satisfaction scores, and worst of all, poor patient care.

In addition, choosing a partner for a post-acute care network is often guesswork, relying on questionable reviews, inaccurate feedback, and sometimes misleading metrics. What may appear as a good facility or partner to send your patients to initially, can have unpredictable consequences due to lack of insight or objective, measurable metrics. A successful hospital should have the ability to inform their patients on which post-acute providers are the best for their welfare after their hospital stay.

Most importantly, stale data and metrics from provider partners can lead to poorly informed decisions or missed opportunities. 30, 60, even 90 days old satisfaction reports or outdated capacity, if such information is available via an exchange, it doesn’t always reflect the whole picture. For the best patient outcome across the care continuum, realtime data is a must.

Real-time, Actionable Data to the Rescue for University of Utah

At University of Utah Hospitals, providing top quality patient care for the people of Utah and the surrounding states has always been a priority. But maintaining that consistent quality across its care continuum hasn’t always been easy, according to Juan Hernandez, Senior Director of Nursing at University of Utah Hospitals. In 2019 UofU partnered with Cortex to gain better visibility into patient care once they leave the facilities, in order to improve the information gathering and data flow in their post-acute network partners. Since then, UofU “have been able to out-perform post-acute providers in the state while taking on sicker patients” according to Juan Hernandez.

The key reason why UofU improved patient outcomes in the more acute cases, is Cortex platform’s powerful ability to analyze the flow of data back and forth between the Hospital and post-acute providers, and give both real-time information and alerts that can be drilled down to individual patients. Check-up™ Calls from Cortex registered nurses add additional patient information, combined with data feeds from exchange CHIE, give both the hospital and its network of SNFs and HHAs “the ability to follow a patient in the whole continuum of care.” With the insight from Cortex’s platform, if a provider receives a complaint from a specific patient, they can log-in and see data for that specific patient, measure the trajectory of care for said patient, and take meaningful action accordingly.

Most importantly, hospitals can use Cortex data to pre-screen potential additions to the post-acute provider groups, by pulling the latest outcomes measured from existing SNFs and HHAs that use Cortex’s services. Cortex’s actual and accurate up-to-date data on satisfaction and outcome measures help UofU make accurate decisions of who to include in their network, and also give patients informed choices for their post-acute care.

Cortex Solutions

By using Cortex’s Check-up™ Calls and Hospital Alerts, University of Utah Hospitals significantly outperformed other post-acute providers in the state of Utah, and improved the care outcome throughout the continuum.

Hospital Alerts automate data aggregation from a variety of sources, from state Health Information Exchanges to post-acute provider’s EMRs, and call results from Cortex’s registered nurses to efficiently track patient progress once they leave the hospital. Cortex’s powerful analytics dissect complicated direct feed from CHIE into something simple to understand and that's actionable. Combined with Check-up™ Calls and risk scoring for individual patients, Hospital Alerts prevent costly readmission penalties and give granular, real-time visibility into metrics not available in the post-acute network before.

Check-up Calls give real voice toto a patient's perspective and their satisfaction with their post-acut care. Track care trajectory and alert hospitals and post-acute networks with follow-up from registered nurses, and allow hospitals to conduct an objective and comprehensive review of any complaints from patients or case managers.

"With Cortex, [UofU was] able to gain insight into our post-acute provider network that we never have before. This insight is visible across various service departments that enabled the hospital to trace the care trajectory of individual patients, or look at providers in-network from a macroscopic level."

—Juan Hernandez, Senior Director of Nursing at University of Utah Hospitals