UPMC and Health Catalyst honored as recipients of the 2018 Microsoft Health Innovation Award

BOSTON, and SALT LAKE CITY, March 7, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- UPMC and Health Catalyst today announced that they have been named joint recipients of Microsoft Corp.'s 2018 Health Innovation Awards.

The awards, which were announced at the 2018 HIMSS Annual Conference and Exhibition in Las Vegas recognize health organizations and their technology solution partners for using Microsoft's intelligent health technologies in innovative ways that help engage patients, empower care teams, optimize clinical and operational effectiveness, and transform health.

UPMC and Health Catalyst won for their use of the Health Catalyst CORUS Suite, a cost-management system co-developed by these two partners and based on Microsoft technology that has saved the health system millions of dollars. CORUS enables CFOs, physicians, service line leaders, and clinical and financial analysts to deeply understand the true cost of providing care across the continuum, and to relate those costs to patient outcomes.

"UPMC is honored to accept the Microsoft Health Innovation Award, which recognizes our effort to identify and address operational inefficiencies and to lower the total cost of care while still improving quality and clinical outcomes for our patients," said Robert DeMichiei, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of UPMC, which is an investor in Health Catalyst. "In this era of value-based care, healthcare organizations must get a better handle on how much it costs to deliver care so we can manage that cost and eliminate waste. At UPMC, we knew we would need an analytic solution that could turn cost data into actionable information– such as by revealing the relationship between cost and clinical variation, identifying best practices, and suggesting opportunities for improvement. Our partnership with Health Catalyst has been the answer."

CORUS's Activity-Based Costing (ABC) platform identifies activities and calculates the cost of each activity based on its actual consumption of resources and materials. CORUS also analyzes and delivers early and actionable insights to increase the cost efficiency of UPMC's processes. Powered by embedded logic and access to the most granular activity and cost data, CORUS offers insights into profitability and variation and identifies cost reduction opportunities. To do that, CORUS aggregates data from a wide variety of information systems, which makes it possible to assign direct costs, such as medications, supplies and labor costs, to patients based on their actual utilization.

"We are honored to receive the Microsoft Health Innovation Award in partnership with UPMC," said Dan Burton, CEO of Health Catalyst. "UPMC is a recognized leader in activity-based cost management, and we are delighted that our work together to refine and deploy the CORUS suite has resulted in early cost management successes across the UPMC network, while also creating a model for other healthcare organizations across the country to reduce waste and costs while improving quality."

Millions in Cost Savings
UPMC has used CORUS's activity-based costing and analytics to effectively drive cost savings and improve clinical outcomes in many of its service lines, including Surgical Services, Women's Health, Orthopedics, and Cardiovascular. Overall, the CORUS Suite generated $5 million in supply savings and gave management insights into $42 million in cost reduction opportunities, including decreases in unnecessary clinical variation and more efficient deployment of OR labor. The time required to access cost information was reduced by up to 97 percent.

In Surgical Services, the ABC method helped produce $3 million in cost savings or cost avoidance over two years. This result represents the cost difference between baseline cases and the cases in the Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) program, in which UPMC surgeons follow protocols designed to reduce complication rates and facilitate faster recovery from surgeries.

Nominations for the Microsoft Health Innovation Awards were submitted by health providers, payers, pharmaceutical and life science organizations, and public and private health institutions across the world for applying Microsoft technology to create transformative and highly-effective innovations. An esteemed panel of industry experts selected this year's winners based on how their innovation represents a forward-thinking development or implementation of a solution that is delivering groundbreaking results and producing better health outcomes for more people. Recipients will be highlighted on the Microsoft Health blog at www.Microsoft.com/Health.

"The health industry is undergoing a digital transformation in which intelligent health technologies are helping organizations, communities and individuals improve care by helping them better understand and share information," said Chris Sakalosky, vice president, U.S. Health & Life Sciences, Microsoft. "This year's Microsoft Health Innovation Award recipients are advancing the goals of improved patient engagement and care coordination through their pioneering use of Microsoft devices, platforms and cloud and AI services."

About UPMC
A $16 billion world-renowned health care provider and insurer, Pittsburgh-based UPMC is inventing new models of patient-centered, cost-effective, accountable care. UPMC provides more than $900 million a year in benefits to its communities, including more care to the region's most vulnerable citizens than any other health care institution. The largest nongovernmental employer in Pennsylvania, UPMC integrates 80,000 employees, more than 30 hospitals, 600 doctors' offices and outpatient sites, and a 3.4 million-member Insurance Services Division, the largest medical insurer in western Pennsylvania. As UPMC works in close collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences, U.S. News & World Report consistently ranks UPMC Presbyterian Shadyside on its annual Honor Roll of America's Best Hospitals. UPMC Enterprises functions as the innovation and commercialization arm of UPMC, and UPMC International provides hands-on health care and management services with partners on four continents. For more information, go to UPMC.com.

About Health Catalyst
Health Catalyst is a next-generation data, analytics, and decision-support company, committed to being a catalyst for massive, sustained improvements in healthcare outcomes. We are the leaders in a new era of advanced predictive analytics for population health and value-based care with a suite of machine learning-driven solutions, decades of outcomes-improvement expertise, and an unparalleled ability to integrate data from across the healthcare ecosystem. Our proven data warehousing and analytics platform helps improve quality, add efficiency and lower costs in support of more than 85 million patients for organizations ranging from the largest US health system to forward-thinking physician practices. Our technology and professional services can help you keep patients engaged and healthy in their homes and workplaces, and we can help you optimize care delivery to those patients when it becomes necessary. We are grateful to be recognized by Fortune, Gallup, Glassdoor, Modern Healthcare and a host of others as a Best Place to Work in technology and healthcare. Visit www.healthcatalyst.com, and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. 

Media Contact:
Todd Stein
Amendola Communications
916-346-4213
[email protected]

SOURCE Health Catalyst

Related Links

http://www.healthcatalyst.com