Novant Health teams up with predictive analytics company Jvion to take on heart failure outcomes

North Carolina-based health system chain Novant Health is teaming up with healthcare artificial intelligence company Jvion to use predictive analytics to reduce readmissions for congestive heart failure patients.

The Atlanta-based technology company will be the health system's inaugural partner for its Institute of Innovation & Artificial Intelligence announced in June.

Jvion CEO Shantanu Nigam told FierceHealthcare his company's technology is different from other healthcare AI predictive analytics platforms in one big way—it identifies high-risk patients whose outcomes can be changed and provides specific interventions. Traditional AI and predictive analytic solutions merely identify high-risk patients and can also cause alarm fatigue, Nigam said.

"The highest risk patient is not necessarily impactable. Typical AI solutions will find the risk, but then the caregiver will still follow the same clinical protocols," he said.

Jvion's predictive analytics pinpoint the impactable patients who are on a risk trajectory that can be changed and provide the patient-specific recommendations that will drive toward a better outcome, according to the company.

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Readmission among congestive heart failure patients can be as high as 35% in the first year and can double with each subsequent hospitalization. Novant Health will leverage Jvion’s predictive analytics platform to help prevent patient harm and associated costs by enabling clinical staff to focus attention, resources and individualized interventions on patients whose outcomes can be improved.

Jvion's platform is based on data from 16 million patients and integrates socioeconomic data along with clinical data for a more complete picture of the patient's risk factors. There are a number of factors outside of clinical care that can increase patients' risk of readmission such as access to a pharmacy, access to a car or having food in the pantry, Nigam said.

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Jvion has successfully reduced congestive heart failure readmissions by 13% on average, preventing 130 readmissions per 1,000 discharges for a potential savings of approximately $1 million, the company said. The firm, which launched in 2011, has contracts with more than 70 health system customers, and the majority have already seen a positive return on investment from using the technology, Nigam said.

Nigam says using technology to reduce preventable harm also targets a bigger issue in healthcare—avoidable waste. The Institute of Medicine reports that the U.S. healthcare system wastes roughly $750 billion per year through unneeded care, byzantine paperwork, fraud and other waste.

"As a system and as a country, we don’t do enough to stop that. The technology is here to address it but we have predictive technology that is adding alarm fatigue and not moving the needle," he said.

The partnership with Jvion supports the Novant Health Institute of Innovation & Artificial Intelligence's focus on using AI to enhance personalized patient care and leveraging actionable data and insights for preventive prediction, diagnosis and treatment to patients, Novant Health officials said.

Novant Health consists of 640 care locations, including 15 hospitals and hundreds of outpatient facilities and physician clinics servicing patients in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. 

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Heart failure is one of the leading causes of hospitalization for older adults, according to Gordon Reeves, M.D., Novant Health director for advanced heart failure. "Patients hospitalized for heart failure are inherently a high-risk population and are more likely to have a diminished quality of life after hospitalization. Jvion may allow us to focus our resources on helping them have a successful transition out of the hospital and recover to a better quality of life," he said.

Angela Yochem, Novant Health executive vice president and chief digital and technology officer, said AI-based technologies like Jvion's enable care teams to move faster and with more precision to address some of the community’s most serious health concerns—in this case, reducing readmissions for patients with congestive heart failure.

Novant Health plans to deploy the platform as a cloud instance on Microsoft Azure.