With thousands of patient encounters processed in its first year, hospital leadership is applying this low-cost, easily deployable technology to shorten process-improvement cycles and improve quality of care.
OAKLAND, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Performance Clinical Systems and Alameda County Medical Center (ACMC) today are reporting highly positive results after a year of clinical use of the Symphony™ cloud-based application (formerly called SmartOrders™). With the news, ACMC is also announcing they are expanding the availability of this interactive clinical checklist system to their Surgical, Patient Discharge, and other departments throughout the hospital.
"We wanted to introduce a user-friendly technology to support physicians at critical decision points in the workflow. Within weeks, Symphony gave us the ability to consistently apply and document our evidence-based practice in support of our quality initiatives," said Howard Landa, MD, ACMC's Chief Medical Information Officer. "Since launching Symphony for admissions from our Emergency Department, we have seen physician and clinical staff adoption steadily increase, now accounting for over 70% of medical admissions,” he added.
The Symphony application provides ACMC with an engine for designing & prototyping clinical content, including order sets and physician documentation, based on a wide variety of guidelines and evidence-based content. The Symphony clinical engine then blends these best-practice guidelines for patient-specific orders; adds a configurable decision support layer directly within the clinical workflow; creates rules-based alerts and notifications to adhere to quality measures and instructions; and provides comprehensive analytics and reporting instantly.
"ACMC has been a terrific partner for illustrating how this technology adds value in a fast-paced clinical setting," noted Jeremy Nobel, MD, Performance Clinical's Chairman and co-founder. "The Symphony interactive clinical checklist system provides our customers with an easily deployable technology that quickly engages clinicians in their quality initiatives and metric-driven performance management. The analytic features of our cloud application pinpoint improvement opportunities, making the data instantly available for real-time feedback."
Performance Clinical's web-based solutions present minimal disruption to existing workflows and can work independently or in conjunction with enterprise legacy systems. Depending on the degree of IT interoperability desired, the Symphony platform can be launched and affecting clinical care in under 60 days. Clinicians can be trained in less than 30 minutes and the unique “rapid prototyping” approach facilitates data-driven evolution of best practices.
"Symphony has been readily embraced by the clinical staff," said Mini Swift, MD, ACMC's Medical Director of Utilization Management. "Once introduced through our Emergency Department, demand from physicians across the organization quickly surfaced. Symphony gives us a platform to systematically fine-tune our evidence-based order sets, responding to both user preferences and quality performance measures. What took weeks and months to accomplish is now done in a days. I can take new approaches to care delivery discussed in a clinical leadership meeting yesterday, implement them on the floor today, and measure their effectiveness real-time. It has energized our clinical staff to see results so quickly. "
Dr. Swift’s team recently implemented a Symphony interactive checklist for profiling patients at the time of admission to begin identifying predictive factors for readmission. By assessing a panel of variables that flag increased risk, physicians are fueling Symphony-driven data capture that will eventually help rethink the entire admission process. "Simply asking and documenting up front provides us with a data set that, when coupled with discharge summaries, will provide insightful analytics in our efforts to reduce readmissions," she noted.
About Alameda County Medical Center
Alameda County Medical Center (ACMC) is a nationally recognized public healthcare system with more than 2,800 employees and 475 accredited beds. It serves the residents of the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area through six facilities including Highland Hospital in Oakland. ACMC provides numerous services including family and women’s health services, acute care, trauma care and more. The system also includes John George Psychiatric Pavilion for acute psychiatric care; Fairmont Hospital, which provides acute rehabilitation and skilled nursing; and three community-based wellness, centers in Oakland, Hayward and Newark, California. ACMC is organized as a Public Hospital Authority and is governed by a Board of Trustees that is appointed by the Alameda County Board of Supervisors.
ACMC is one of the premier public hospitals in the nation. Its trauma expertise is recognized across the United States and it is a teaching hospital, training tomorrow’s surgeons who come from prominent Bay Area medical schools to complete their training. ACMC is ranked #1 in financial performance among public hospitals in the State of California. It is accredited for operations performance and quality of service and care by the Joint Commission, the body that accredits U.S. hospitals. The Joint Commission recognized ACMC for high performance in key quality measures where ACMC outperformed other health care providers within its service areas.
About Performance Clinical Systems
Performance Clinical Systems is a healthcare technology company based in San Francisco, California and Boston, Massachusetts. The company helps healthcare providers excel in pay-for-performance contracting models by enabling metric-driven care. Its flagship application, Symphony, is a patented interactive clinical checklist system that adds precision and consistency to evidence-based medicine, provides dynamic decision support directly at the point of care, generates rules-based alerts and notifications, and gathers essential data for advanced analytics and quality improvement.
The system is powerful in its simplicity and attractive to key stakeholders because it can be deployed rapidly (within weeks, not months), is highly scalable, quickly embraced by end-users, supports virtually any content source and is compatible with other HIT systems—often at fraction of their cost.
Performance Clinical's customers include physician groups, hospitals, health systems, accountable care organizations and health plans. Chris Johnson, MD, MPH and Jeremy Nobel, MD, MPH founded the privately held company.
CONTACT:
Performance Clinical Systems
Robert Murphy, 415-830-3435
[email protected]
www.performanceclinical.com
KEYWORDS: United States North America California
INDUSTRY KEYWORDS: Technology Software Practice Management Health Hospitals
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