Geisinger to implement EHR-agnostic tool for real-time COVID-19 surveillance

Jackie Drees -

Danville, Pa.-based Geisinger Health System in July plans to use Premier's new EHR agnostic app, which offers real-time surveillance and COVID-19 surge predictions, according to Harvard Business Review.

After Geisinger's roll out, health systems including Atrium Health, Community Health Network, Vidant Health and AdventHealth also plan to implement the app. Premier, a data analytics and clinical decision support solutions company, will offer the app for free this year to health systems that use its clinical platform.

Premier used its existing clinical platform, which accesses EHRs of 200,000 physicians and providers across more than 400 U.S. hospitals, to build the automated app, which can integrate with EHRs from different companies. The app works with Premier's decision-support tool that clinicians use for ordering medical imaging procedures. Using natural language processing and machine learning tech, the app scans clinicians' patient records and orders for terms such as "trouble breathing" and "loss of taste" among other COVID-19-related symptoms and infection indicators.

The app will examine EHRs of patients receiving COVID-19 tests, with or without an imaging study. Once the surveillance capabilities are expanded to the broader population, Premier plans for the app to predict patients' risk status and need for hospital beds.

The June 16 HBR report was authored by Jonathan Slotkin, MD, associate chief medical informatics officer at Geisinger, Mike Alkire, president of Premier, and Scott Weingarten, MD, medical professor at Cedars-Sinai and chief clinical and innovation officer at Premier.

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