While VigiLanz was founded in 2001, its recent advancements have recently garnered it significant attention. Gartner, an IT research and advisory company, named VigiLanz to its list of five “Cool Healthcare Providers” in 2015. VigiLanz is highlighted as an “example of how an innovative and practical solution to often urgent and serious medical, healthcare and public health needs will require a very different management paradigm around the electronic instantiation of policies and actions,” according to Gartner’s report.
VigiLanz’s host of technological offerings supports hospital infection preventionists, pharmacists, quality practitioners and other clinicians by proposing real-time enterprise data surveillance and clinical intelligence resource solutions. Its products and solutions focus on infection control, antimicrobial stewardship, adverse drug events, quality surveillance analytics and predictive modeling.
What makes VigiLanz “cool,” according to Gartner, is its software’s ability to leverage any EHR data, and also its ability to satisfy the urgent demand for surveillance, data integration, analytics and action alerting.
David Goldsteen, MD, chairman and CEO of VigiLanz, says VigiLanz was founded on the premise that the traditional, one-size-fits-all approach to quality improvement wasn’t effective because each patient is an individual with unique, often complex needs. Early on, VigiLanz developed an agnostic approach for leveraging EHR data from healthcare systems. From that data, it identifies opportunities to optimize care and detect potentially adverse events in real-time. However, this was only half of the equation, according to Dr. Goldsteen.
“We identified the need and opportunity to hone our system and healthcare systems with better intelligence,” says Dr. Goldsteen. “We’ve created a full suite of analysis and predictive modeling intelligence, which has informed our clinical intelligence and can help advise hospitals and help them improve.”
VigiLanz identifies 100,000 “moments of truth” every day in hospitals as people make decisions, and its analytic capabilities and alert function help inform those decisions.
VigiLanz’s Dynamic Monitoring Suite is a software-as-a-service model that aggregates information from a variety of data sources and provides real-time surveillance. Its solutions include an advanced rule engine for rapid, exception-based alerting — in which only an error, such as an incorrect dosage, triggers activation if a hospital’s specific guidance is not being followed — and enable the fast development of responses, exception-based and temporally rendered alerts and metadata to quickly disseminate information to a defined community.
“By virtue of having an exception-based system, we identify in advance and apply the most appropriate method to prevent adverse events with actionable alerts on the clinical intelligence side,” says Dr. Goldsteen. “When providers hear from VigiLanz on the alerts side, they know it is something they really want to know.”
The company recently enhanced the capabilities of its National Healthcare Safety Network full feature solution suite by adding NHSN Direct Reporting as a reporting option for infection preventionists, which allows them to send authenticated, encrypted infection reports from VigiLanz directly to NHSN without requiring separate logins or handling separate files. VigiLanz’ SaaS technology enables hospital IPs to leverage case detection as well as data auto-population to make infection surveillance more efficient and effective, while reducing users’ submission time.
The difference between VigiLanz and other intelligence data analytics vendors is that VigiLanz does not only deliver software and services, but it also maintains constant contact with its clients to help them with rules, clinical problem solving and resolve issues around the clock. Additionally, while the company’s products and services become part of physicians’ workflow, VigiLanz uses primary and proprietary metadata to analyze and identify financial and operational opportunities for improvement and works with clients on an advisory level.
The majority of VigiLanz’s work can be classified as enterprise intelligence resources, a data analytics layer that works alongside an EMR system. The advantage of the EIR layer is the rapid response capability to emerging healthcare situations, such as Ebola and the carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae and Middle East respiratory syndrome outbreaks.
The needs at the EMR level are more rigid and structured, those at the EIR level are more innovative, flexible and equipped for rapid response. While VigiLanz’s capabilities extend beyond the data sharing and retrospective analytic capabilities of EMRs, EMRs are an essential partner to the company.
“Until we had EMRs and the ability to have highly structured patient data flowing around on the transactional side, companies like VigiLanz in the layer of EIR intelligence couldn’t exist,” says Dr. Goldsteen. “Now we are able to provide a lot of flexibility to hospitals real-time healthcare situations.”
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