Network medicine: How cloud-based platforms position hospitals to adapt and thrive

Since the publication of To Err is Human in 1999, the healthcare industry has made a concerted effort to reduce patient harm and improve quality in the healthcare setting. But despite the billions of dollars that have been invested in this endeavor, the rate of adverse events has not improved substantially.

In fact, a 2016 study by researchers at Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine found medical errors are the true third-leading cause of death in the United States, killing more than 250,000 Americans a year.

"We are 17 years into the journey of eradicating patient harm but we haven't made that much headway," Todd Rothenhaus, MD, senior vice president and CMO of athenahealth, said at Becker's Hospital Review's 8th Annual Meeting in Chicago. "The investment in reducing harm and improving quality has been enormous, but the results have not been particularly flattering."

Dr. Rothenhaus said one of the problems is that hospitals and health systems are "still relying on an old fashioned way of sharing ideas and collaborating." Convening at meetings, listening to presentations and then attempting to relay new ideas to colleagues back at one's organization is a slow way to move forward, he said. "We shouldn't still have to get on an airplane to make a change."

The solution, according to Dr. Rothenhaus, is the adoption of "network medicine," or platforms that connect providers within and across health systems to drive clinical improvements and share best practices. These systems should be able to leverage network data to focus on interventions to "stamp out" bad medicine, and accelerate the dissemination and adoption of new innovations at the point of care, according to Dr. Rothenhaus.

Similar to how global platforms such as Amazon or Facebook connect users and influence consumers' decisions with targeted ads, a cloud-based healthcare platform with a broad set of patient and clinical data can produce insights to "nudge" clinicians and reinforce behaviors that could ultimately improve quality and patient safety.   

The athenahealth platform — which supports all of the company's cloud-based network services, including its EMR, revenue cycle, patient engagement, care coordination and population health services — aggregates the health information of all of its providers nationwide and provides tailored insights to meet a health system's unique needs. Unlike siloed legacy systems comprised of disparate software, athenhealth's platform is nimble and adaptable.

To achieve the goal of eradicating patient harm and improving quality, health systems must have access to digital platforms that can aggregate broad sets of patient data and cultivate intelligence around care pathways and best practices, and deliver these insights to any single moment of care.

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