The collaboration enables integrated digital completion workflows and establishes a single, centralized source of truth with built-in error prevention – enabling the Intermountain Healthcare team to honor patients’ end-of-life wishes, avoid unwanted healthcare utilization and reduce trauma for families, caregivers and clinicians when faced with hard decisions in a medical crisis.

Vynca, a national leader in advance care planning solutions, today announced a partnership with Intermountain Healthcare, a not-for-profit health system, to ensure advance care planning documents are easily and reliably accessible to clinicians, patients and their caregivers across the care continuum. The collaboration enables integrated digital completion workflows and establishes a single, centralized source of truth with built-in error prevention – enabling the Intermountain Healthcare team to honor patients’ end-of-life wishes, avoid unwanted healthcare utilization and reduce trauma for families, caregivers and clinicians when faced with hard decisions in a medical crisis.

Why It Matters

Intermountain has been at the leading edge of healthcare systems identifying evidence-based innovations to achieve the Triple Aim – improving experience of care, health of populations and reducing per capita costs. As such, they recognized that improving end-of-life care quality and reducing unwanted healthcare interventions required a new solution with the digital data capabilities to define and track success. Intermountain is able to transform the process of advance care planning by integrating Vynca’s end-to-end solution with the health system’s existing clinical workflow and their Cerner electronic health record (EHR), who is also a Vynca partner. The collaboration enables customized outreach to patients, shared decision making to digitally complete documents and ensures documents are available to clinicians, patients and their selected caregivers.

“We are grateful to collaborate with an innovative health system like Intermountain to support providers and patients through the advance care planning process,” said Ryan Van Wert, MD, CEO and co-founder, Vynca. “Vynca’s solutions and services are designed to guide and empower individuals and providers to engage in these important conversations. Through shared decision making and document accessibility, patients can feel confident that their care preferences will be known across the care continuum.”

Integration with Cerner EHR

A lack of clarity in patient wishes, combined with concerns over document accuracy and integrity and breakdowns in transitions of care have historically led to low clinical confidence in advance care planning documents, as well as patient safety concerns and unwanted healthcare utilization. By integrating Vynca’s digital technology solutions throughout the entire system, Intermountain gains the ability to increase advance care planning conversations and documentation, access forms at the point of care, decrease hospital mortality and readmission rates and improve patient and family care satisfaction.

Intermountain receives business intelligence and reporting information on when, where and if advance care forms were accessed at the point of care before critical clinical decisions were made – delivering insights into utilization, success and value from implementing a digitized advance care planning program. Vynca enables providers and patients to not just view documents, but also continue discussions across all care settings.

IBM Watson Health announced the launch of an IBM Digital Health Pass to help organizations enable individuals to return to work or school. The tool is built on IBM blockchain technology aimed at allowing users to share their verified health pass – established on criteria such as COVID-19 test results – without exposing the data used to generate it, according to the organization.

“We believe that trust and transparency remain paramount when developing a platform like a digital health passport, or any solution that handles sensitive personal information, and we remain committed to this philosophy as we continue to build solutions to help support organizations during the current public health crisis,” said Eric Piscini, vice president of blockchain at IBM Watson Health, in a statement.

As technology-enabled testing and tracing capability has ramped up throughout the United States, companies have begun to explore the possibility of relying on digital mechanisms to ease individuals’ return to public life.

“The shift back to public spaces is a slow journey at best,” said Paul Roma, general manager, IBM Watson Health, at the HLTH VRTL 2020 conference.

“In order for us to get back to the activities we love … we’ll need new innovations, new approaches and new technologies.”

The Digital Health Pass, said company representatives, is one such tool, aimed at streamlining users’ ability to travel or work while safeguarding their privacy and health.

According to the IBM website, users manage their information through an encrypted digital wallet on their smartphone and control what they share, while organizations can determine responses for health statuses and design business rules.

When health data becomes available, individuals can scan a QR code and add that information to a digital wallet. The data is stored by that individual and not by those organizations requesting health statuses. Individuals could, for example, share their vaccination records but not their health status.

The health pass is verified against the blockchain to confirm authenticity and validity.

“Because organizations may tailor the criteria of the health status, an individual’s health status may vary from place to place. For example, an airline may have a more stringent system for establishing wellness status for passengers boarding a plane than a restaurant may have for diners seeking outdoor seating,” explained Piscini in a blog.

This past week, trials began for CommonPass, a digital health passport that would allow travelers to document their COVID-19 status electronically and present it when they board a plane or cross a border.

“Partners across the globe are looking for sustainable solutions to keep travel healthy, responsible and safe,” said Dr. Martin Cetron, the director of the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a statement last week.

“CDC is eager to learn from the CommonPass pilot, as it could be one of the many potential tools that may one day contribute to a safe, responsible and healthy global air travel experience,” Cetron continued.

Of course, companies must contend with the public perception of digital health passes – and, relatedly, COVID-19-tracking apps. According to a June study, most Americans say they won’t use COVID-19-tracing apps out of fear for their data.

Furthermore, a negative COVID-19 test does not guarantee that an individual is not currently contagious, nor does a normal temperature reading.

“There is an emerging opportunity to help organizations as they aim to bring individuals back to their public spaces,” said Roma in a statement.

“Organizations are looking for solutions that can help them manage the return of individuals to public places, while striving to protect their privacy. We are developing the IBM Digital Health Pass with the goal of providing organizations with another resource as they begin to reopen,” Roma continued.

Hospitals all over the world must increase their efficiency and productivity and boost quality and safety, while containing and reducing costs. Over years, this resulted in linear cuts, which proved to be a disaster during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The European Commission has invested €40 million to foster researchers that may redesign the hospital of the future.

Dr Leandro Pecchia from the School of Engineering at the University of Warwick, has been awarded €13 million for the ODIN project, which will explore the use of robots and artificial intelligence to help ease the pressures on hospitals, which will be crucial also in the recovery of Covid-19 and to help any other future disasters.

EU Hospitals were completely unprepared to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, also because the number of ICU beds per million of EU habitants has been reduced by 75% in the past 30 years, and due to the unneglectable need to invest in territory healthcare services in response to demographic challenges.

ODIN will deploy technologies along three lines of intervention:
· Empowering workers using AI, cybernetics and bionics
· Introducing autonomous and collaborative robots for enhancing hospital efficacy and safety
· Introducing and enhancing medical locations and medical device management with IoT and video analytics

Dr Pecchia continues: “These areas of intervention will be piloted in six top hospitals in Berlin, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Utrecht and Lodz. ODIN will span from clinical to logistic procedures, including patient management, medical device and PPE management, disaster preparedness for example reorganising Hospitals in case of pandemics, and hospital resiliency.”

The researchers will work with three top medical device manufacturers: Samsung, Philips and Medtronics; as well as seven SMEs to achieve the vision of the project, which is that hospital management can be revolutionized by using data driven management such as Industry 4.0 technologies, the same way evidence based medicine revolutionised medicine with data-driven procedures.

This is the 5th successful project written by Dr Pecchia and his team in the past 12 months, focusing on IoT, AI, Robots and big-data for healthcare, for a total value of £35 million.

Orbita, the leading provider of HIPAA-compliant conversational voice and chat solutions for healthcare and life sciences organizations, announced the expansion of its solution offerings in response to the changing landscape in healthcare, particularly in the age of COVID-19. Orbita’s newly updated digital front door offering, OrbitaENGAGE, now features more support for care navigation and campaigns, enabling providers to reach and retain new and existing patients in support of reopening initiatives, while reducing burden on clinical and call center staff.

Hospital revenues are dropping over $1 billion each day as COVID-19 continues to impact patient volumes and care delivery. OrbitaENGAGE provides healthcare organizations with the tools necessary to reach and engage patients where they are 24/7 through natural, intuitive conversational voice and chatbot technology.

New solution updates include automated, flexible campaigns that support provider outreach, helping to bring patients back in and prevent further gaps in care.

Along with this targeted outreach support, OrbitaENGAGE creates a seamless experience for patients at every point in their care journey, guiding and directing existing patients to the right level of care and resources based on their needs. The solution enables patients to take control of their healthcare experience through its messaging and communications module. The module facilitates and automates notifications and nudges for patients to take action and stay connected to their care team— including rescheduling canceled appointments, communicating reopening and safety procedures, pre-screening prior to appointments, mental health screenings and support, and more.

“The emergence of COVID-19 has accelerated the need for health systems to digitally transform to meet their operational challenges and consumer expectations.

But making sense of a quickly evolving ecosystem of innovative solutions is extremely hard for health systems,” said David Harvey, CEO of Panda Health. “Panda exists to help health systems procure and adopt digital health solutions safely, economically, and at speed. Orbita has clearly emerged as a leader in their space, meeting our criteria on these three principles, and we are thrilled to represent them in our marketplace.”

“We developed OrbitaENGAGE to help healthcare organizations curate their digital presence or their digital front door strategy,” said Kristi Ebong, Orbita’s SVP of Corporate Strategy. “Our goal is to make it easier for providers to create a streamlined process that helps patients identify care options and take action, resulting in a better overall experience, more conversions, and ultimately an increase in revenue and improvement in health outcomes.”

Built on the Orbita platform, the modular digital front door solution allows for flexible configuration, including voice search, conversational calls-to-action, and operational dashboards, to ensure organizations remain agile in times of uncertainty and change, without reinventing their digital transformation roadmap.

Changi General Hospital (CGH), a 1000-bed academic medical institution under SingHealth located in the eastern part of Singapore, together with the Integrated Health Information System (IHiS), Singapore’s national HIT agency, have developed a Community Acquired Pneumonia and COVID-19 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Predictive Engine (CAPE) that can determine the likelihood of whether the patient has mild or severe pneumonia, based on the chest X-ray image.

WHY IT MATTERS

The ability to quickly predict the patient’s expected severity of pneumonia would enable clinicians and administrators to efficiently allocate healthcare resources and treat patients, particularly in pandemic situations, where there may be an increased need for inpatient care and critical care support.

As pneumonia severity correlates to the degree of Chest X-Ray (CXR) lung image abnormality, CGH’s Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine and Radiology teams recognized the potential in leveraging AI to predict the severity of pneumonia from CXR images, and worked with the IHiS Health Insights team to develop CAPE.

HOW IT WORKS

Using more than 3,000 CXR images and 200,000 data points including lab results and clinical history, CAPE was trained to generate a score for (a) low-risk pneumonia with anticipated short inpatient hospitalization; (b) the risk of mortality (death); and (c) the risk of requiring critical care support – indicators of pneumonia severity – from CXR images.

Initial results have been promising – validation tests at CGH showed that CAPE has an approximate accuracy of 80% in predicting the future presence or absence of severe pneumonia. This is comparable to traditional pneumonia severity tools that are scored manually.

FUTURE APPLICATIONS

CAPE is implemented as a standalone desktop application that can be installed on radiology workstations. This helps to ensure ease of integration and use, as well as a shorter deployment time, as only minor changes need to be made to the existing system to incorporate CAPE.

Work is on-going to integrate more data-sets from clinical data from the SingHealth cluster including Singapore General Hospital and Sengkang General Hospital and other public health institutions in Singapore, which would likely make CAPE even more accurate.

The team is also exploring collaborative models, including hosting it as a “freeware” collaborative tool on a research platform for interested researchers globally, so that CAPE can be generalized and eventually used internationally.

THE LARGER PICTURE

In tackling the COVID-19 pandemic situation in Singapore, IHiS has worked with its healthcare partners on over 50 healthtech projects. These include equipping Community Care Facilities (CCFs) with technologies – CCFs are temporary health facilities which were created to deal with clinically lower risk COVID-19 patients and the CAPE AI tool.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, IHiS worked with Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) to develop its Command, Control and Communications (C3) system, which went live in the third quarter of 2019. During the pandemic, TTSH accelerated the module’s enhancement to incorporate the real time location system (RTLS) and video-monitor human traffic.

ON THE RECORD

“One main advantage of using AI as a predictive tool is that the risk of patients requiring critical care can be calculated almost instantaneously. Emergency Department and ward doctors can receive an early warning for possible clinical deterioration and prescribe the appropriate interim measures to improve patient outcomes,” said Dr Charlene Liew, Project Lead and Deputy Chief Medical Informatics Officer, CGH, and Director of Innovation, SingHealth Radiological Sciences Academic Clinical Program (RADSC ACP).

South Korea-based medical AI solutions development company VUNO has obtained approval from the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) for its AI-based cardiac arrest prediction software, VUNO Med–DeepCARS as an Innovative Medical Device.

The software is specialized in predicting the risk of cardiac arrest and performs a medical analysis of vital signs of patients in general wards stored in the electronic medical records (EMR) including heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and body temperature. The collection of data forms the basis for predicting the

likelihood of an emergency cardiac arrest situation occurring within the next 24 hours. Clinical testing is underway for VUNO Med–DeepCARS based on a clinical trial plan approved by the MFDS in June.

According to a research paper published in Critical Care Medicine (CCM) in February, VUNO Med–DeepCARS had a level of sensitivity twice as high as Modified Early Warning Score (MEWS) – a conventional way of cardiac arrest prediction – for the same number of alarms.

THE LARGER TREND

VUNO also recently announced that it was selected to be part of a project, which is led by the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA) under the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT), to technologically demonstrate an AI-run system for medical image-based analysis and diagnosis.

The company plans to develop AI-based medical solutions that can meet the needs of the military environment and prove the accuracy and efficiency in medical

image analysis done by military hospitals and medical corps, in partnership with Wonju Severance Christian Hospital and Gachon University Gil Hospital.

In June, VUNO obtained CE Mark for five of its solutions: VUNO Med –BoneAge, VUNO Med –DeepBrain, VUNO Med -Chest X-Ray, VUNO Med –Fundus AI and VUNO Med –LungCT AI, Healthcare IT News reported.

ON THE RECORD

“VUNO Med–DeepCARS makes predictions about cardiac arrest based on a variety of vital signs to allow for early detection and swift response. Obviously, this epoch-making solution will serve as a game changer once it comes into clinical use,” said Hyun-Jun Kim, CEO of VUNO.

He added, “VUNO is dedicated to pioneer groundbreaking AI-based solutions across various medical fields from deep learning-based solutions using medical images to technologies regarding vital signs.”