Leading Not-For-Profit Health Care System
Improving Patient Care with Cognitive Solutions
Our client is a leading not-for-profit health care system and one of the largest community-based health systems in the state of Florida.
Critical Care Data was Inaccessible
One of our client’s goals is to provide the best care management recommendations and care plans for its moderate to high-risk patients.
To achieve this aim, the Care Management team sought a more efficient method of identifying patients with a primary or secondary diagnosis of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) upon admission, so that more time could be allocated to care transitions, the development of care plans for COPD patients, and interacting with patients.
In order to provide enhanced patient care, it was critical that our client have an efficient method to surface patients that matched their target COPD profile.Unfortunately, extracting this data was a time-intensive manual effort, as it was locked in unstructured data such as clinician notes and required thorough manual chart review by the Care Management team.
Innovating Operations with Cognition
IBM Watson technology is revolutionizing and transforming industries through cognitive solutions, and our client wanted to know if and how Watson could help to innovate its clinical and business operations.
After confirming that Watson could both drive innovation and create unique value, we were engaged because of our demonstrated leadership in delivering both healthcare and IBM Watson solutions.
We implemented an IBM Watson-based solution to surface symptoms, diseases, disorders, and relevant medications previously unavailable from structured data in its Cerner EHR. Watson Explorer Advanced Edition and the IBM Healthcare Annotators are used to analyze patient records to extract relevant, contextual data and transform that information into structured data points. The healthcare annotators “read” this unstructured information, tuned appropriately to best interpret and transform the data.
The analysis result is incorporated into our client’s analytics platform and exposed to their care management team, providing more complete patient information and significantly reducing the manual effort required to identify the appropriate patient population. Watson helps our client understand and analyze this unstructured patient information, ultimately transforming it into actionable data that provides previously unavailable insight into patient care scenarios and clinical decision making.
The accuracy of patient identification has been increased from 51% to 92%.
Results
Breathing Easier with Watson
The Watson solution supports the extraction of factors that help inform a patient’s care plan, and will streamline the patient file review process to increase the number of patients each Care Manager can spend time with daily and ensures that all COPD patients are identified and communicated with.
Care Managers can now develop holistic care plans for patients diagnosed with COPD. Ultimately, this pilot will become a foundation for extending Watson’s cognitive capabilities to additional chronic diseases; and throughout our client to improve clinical decision making and patient care for not only its moderate to high-risk patients, but its entire patient populations.
Our client’s collective care management team can now focus more on care plan development and has seen productivity improvements of up to 14 hours per day.
