Unite the Healthiverse
Good care decisions aren’t built on a partial picture of a patient’s condition. Yet in healthcare, having data distributed across multiple systems is a fact of life: Hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies rely on separate systems to host an individual patient’s record. Data sharing is required when patients transition from one clinician to another, and while the clinical meaning is clear to the sending system, that meaning is often lost when it reaches the receiving system. Within the clinical workflow, DrFirst’s MedHx℠ with SmartSuite℠ gathers medication histories from multiple sources, cleans the data, then converts free text from external systems into a user’s unique terminology and presents the data into appropriate fields in their electronic health record (EHR) system. SmartSuite uses patented AI to codify prescriptions and refill requests, and reconcile medication histories when exchanged between EHR systems, payers, and pharmacies. SmartSuite also enhances continuity of care documents in real time as they are received from health information exchanges (HIEs) or when converting large batches of data from legacy EHRs. Making actionable medication history available to clinicians is vital to patient safety. When a patient arrives at the emergency department, clinicians need to know what medications he or she is taking so they can make informed care decisions. Patients often can’t remember details about their prescriptions. And non-verbal patients can’t inform EMTs or hospital staff of their medications. Making this information available digitally and easily consumable in EHRs is important to avoid adverse drug events, allergic reactions, and drug duplication.
Variations in national drug codes and discrepancies in prescribing instructions (known as sigs) contribute to a process that requires 50+ clicks or keystrokes to manually reconcile a patient’s medication history—tasks that can hinder productivity and contribute to clinician burnout while impacting patient safety and throughput. When medication records are imported into an EHR system, sigs arrive as unstructured free text, often with missing information and using a variety of terms for the same instructions (for example, “by mouth” vs. “orally”). Using clinical and statistical context, SmartSuite’s patented AI cleans and structures data beyond standard neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). Whereas NLP can look beyond individual words and phrases to understand the context in which they are being delivered, it can’t figure out what data is missing, or determine whether the meaning it interprets is clinically safe. Using MedHx with SmartSuite, our customers find medication history data on more patients. Our data sources include the same national pharmacies and pharmacy benefit manager information provided by other medication history vendors, plus additional data for each health system’s unique patient population, made available through our relationships with local and community pharmacies and EHRs. Our patented AI gives clinicians actionable medication history they can easily import versus having to manually enter that information. The AI translates free text, infers meaning, and prepopulates discrete fields within a patient’s medication list. Clinicians typically see 80% reduction in clicks and keystrokes, 30 seconds saved for each medication, and 93% of sigs translated and prepopulated in their EHR system.
SmartSuite represents a breakthrough in the way it deciphers clinical language and interprets missing clinical details that are implied but not present. Consider a prescription for a Lisinopril 10mg tablet (a medication to treat high blood pressure), including the instruction “tk 1xD.” The AI engine not only interprets the clinical intent but also sees that for this medication, a route of “oral” can be safely inferred. SmartSuite AI is built on the principle that “no answer is better than the wrong answer.” For example, if “tk 11 1xD” were entered for this medication, safety checks would prevent SmartSuite from performing the dose translation, which forces a manual review by a clinician, averting a potentially negative patient outcome. With higher-quality data, the EHR can more accurately trigger critical safety checks, such as drug interactions and allergy alerts. This can help reduce adverse drug events, which cause more than 100,000 deaths per year. The second innovation is in the way SmartSuite reframes the intent into the nomenclature of the receiver’s system. SmartSuite allows each system to be interconnected while independent and unaware of each other and removes the data transcription effort for clinicians. It then codifies the free-text information into discrete data elements that a receiver’s system can understand, without manual intervention.
WellSpan Health in Pennsylvania is using MedHx with SmartSuite to: • Find medication history for 93% of patients, and 97% of patients over 65 • Receive medication history data from 73 local pharmacies • Fill 2.4 million additional prescriptions in first six months • Process 270,000 patient records from legacy EHR systems o This included 5.5 million medications, with 4.8 million imported into the EHR See the story about WellSpan Health in EHR Intelligence, How artificial intelligence EHR integration improved patient safety: https://ehrintelligence.com/news/how-artificial-intelligence-ehr-integration-improved-patient-safety Cone Health in North Carolina uses MedHx with SmartSuite to: • Find medication history for 93% of patients and 98% for high-risk patients over the age of 65 • Increase staff satisfaction by nearly 40% • Receive data from 69 local and independent pharmacies • Fill over 2.8 million additional prescriptions • Avoid 20 million clicks and keystrokes See the story about Cone Health in Healthcare IT News, Rx tech helps Cone Health get more accurate meds histories in its Epic EHR: https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/rx-tech-helps-cone-health-get-more-accurate-meds-histories-its-epic-ehr Covenant HealthCare in Michigan relied on MedHx with SmartSuite to gather medication history data digitally rather than in face-to-face interviews in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, helping preserve personal protective equipment and prevent virus transmission. Covenant reported: • 93% success in translating free-text elements into the hospital’s standard terminology and putting the data into appropriate fields • 14% productivity recaptured per shift • 35% increase in accuracy by adding data from local and community pharmacies See the story about Covenant HealthCare in EMR Industry, AI embedded in the EHR helps prevent adverse medication interactions: https://www.emrindustry.com/ai-embedded-in-the-ehr-helps-prevent-adverse-medication-interactions/
Adverse drug events caused by medication discrepancies affect up to 40% of hospitalized patients and 17% of patients in the 30 days following discharge. Clinicians need accurate and clinically actionable medication histories to help protect patients from dangerous ADEs and save time gathering and entering information, which can introduce errors.
