Health Catalyst Closed-Loop Analytics Addresses Physician Burnout, Enables Health Data Ecosystem

Solution reduces click fatigue, makes its analytical findings actionable within the workflow of third-party IT systems including the EHR

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Health Catalyst

Jun 10, 2019, 08:01 ET

SILICON SLOPES, Utah, June 10, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Health Catalyst®, Inc. and its customers are taking healthcare analytics to the next level by bridging the gap between informing professionals about a patient, and actually empowering them with actions they can take in real-time to improve patient care, enhance the patient and provider experience, and lower costs.

Health Catalyst Closed-Loop Analytics, currently implemented at 17 U.S. health systems, brings data full circle by surfacing analytic insights to healthcare professionals at the point of decision. Whether it is a predictive algorithm that derives better patient risk scores to enable more intelligent alerts in native systems, or an embedded application that helps support a patient-centric clinical problem, Closed-Loop Analytics empowers end-users with the following benefits:

Context-Specific Actionability: Analytics and insights are designed to spur appropriate helpful actions to resolve a nearly unlimited range of issues, surfaced directly within the workflow of electronic health records (EHRs), billing systems and other third-party applications. By presenting insights within the electronic workflow of healthcare professionals and linking the insights to specific workflow actions, Closed Loop Analytics makes data more actionable than a standalone dashboard or application.
Efficiencies That Reduce Burnout: Streamlining of inefficient tasks within the EHR reduces caregiver burdens such as excessive clicks to perform an action. Primary care physicians spend nearly 2 hours working on electronic health records (EHR) for every 1 hour of direct patient care, according to a study in the Annals of Family Medicine. Closed Loop Analytics helps to minimize that burden and potentially lower the incidence of physician burnout.

Improving Care for COPD Patients
By driving recommendations into the EHR workflow, Closed Loop Analytics is helping to improve care for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) at Unity Point Health, a network of hospitals, clinics and home care services in Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin, said Judy Beswick, the health system's director of clinical innovation/transformation.

"Our old risk prioritization tool for patients with COPD had reporting and analytics value, but it couldn't generate actionable insights to drive more timely and effective care," said Beswick. "We worked with Health Catalyst to embed their analytics tool into our EHR and now the care team for patients with COPD can directly access the patient record for more in-depth analysis, review, and care planning. It really helps them identify efficient and effective interventions for high-risk patients with COPD."

Enabling a Health Data Ecosystem
Closed-Loop Analytics' ability to drive insights into actions within workflow systems extends to virtually any third-party application. The open architecture of the Health Catalyst Data Operating System (DOS™) enables a growing ecosystem of analytics vendors that can leverage DOS and up to 300 data source systems to improve patient care, the patient experience and the cost of that care.

One example is The Queen's Health Systems, a nonprofit health care organization in Hawaii with 70 locations throughout the Pacific. The Queen's Health Systems used Closed Loop Analytics to enable insights from Health Catalyst to appear in the Smart Ribbon® from IllumiCare, a non-intrusive, EHR-agnostic ribbon of information that hovers over the EHR screen and provides patient-specific information to support decisions by clinicians. As a result, data from Health Catalyst's HCC Insights app helps the health system's providers identify the appropriate coding for specific levels of care in value-based contracts; and the company's Community Care Application provides insights designed to support interventions around the needs of high-risk patients.

"We've invested heavily, for many years, to develop an open, flexible and scalable data platform, recognizing that no single vendor can solve all of healthcare's problems," said Health Catalyst CEO Dan Burton. "Enabling the use of data in clinical, financial, and operational settings enables healthcare professionals to make better decisions system-wide. Our open data platform, the Data Operating System, makes Closed-Loop Analytics a reality. We anticipate that an ecosystem of clinical, financial and operational professionals within healthcare organizations and other vendor organizations will take advantage of this open platform to build meaningful data-informed capabilities that improve patient care and reduce physician burnout through their innovation."

About Health Catalyst
Health Catalyst is a leading provider of data and analytics technology and services to healthcare organizations, committed to being the catalyst for massive, measurable, data-informed healthcare improvement. Our customers leverage our cloud-based data platform—powered by data from more than 100 million patient records, and encompassing trillions of facts—as well as our analytics software and professional services expertise to make data-informed decisions and realize measurable clinical, financial, and operational improvements. We envision a future in which all healthcare decisions are data informed. Learn more at www.healthcatalyst.com.

SOURCE Health Catalyst