Vyne, a market leader in secure health information exchange and electronic healthcare communication management, announced today it has been acquired by The Jordan Company, L.P., a middle-market-focused private equity firm with original capital commitments in excess of $11 billion. This new investment supports Vyne’s commitment of providing market-leading healthcare technology and support to thousands of dental practices, hospitals and major health systems across the United States.
The acquisition of Vyne from private equity firm Accel-KKR, comes after five years of consistent top and bottom-line growth as well as a strategic acquisition to expand its product offerings. With the backing of The Jordan Company, Vyne will further expand upon its already robust technology platforms that facilitate the electronic capture, storage and submission of healthcare data in any form – voice, document, image, data, fax or electronic interface — to provide business intelligence throughout any care organization. Vyne’s proven solutions connect disconnected data to close gaps in documentation,delivering improved financial strength, operational performance and patient experience for medical and dental providers, partners and payers.
Lindy Benton
“This acquisition provides Vyne with an amazing opportunity to serve more healthcare organizations and we’re looking forward to working with The Jordan Company to continue expanding our capabilities for serving the medical and dental markets,” said Lindy Benton, Vyne President and CEO. “Vyne clients and partners will benefit from this strategic move as we grow our portfolio of solutions that help position their healthcare organizations for the future.”
“Vyne has a long and successful track record of providing software products that deliver true value to healthcare organizations.,” said Dan Williams, Partner of The Jordan Company. “We are excited to partner with Lindy Benton and the Vyne management team to use our resources to support their mission of connecting disconnected data.”
Vyne serves the dental market through its NEA Powered by Vyne business, which continues to lead the dental market with its FastAttach® solution for compliant electronic attachments, serving more than 73,000 dental practice offices nationwide.
Vyne Medical servesthe healthcare industry with the robust healthcare content management capabilities of Trace™ and secure electronic information exchange solutions in use by more than 800 hospital and health system clients nationwide.
Clinician-to-patient communications are typically anchored
by in-person, at-home visits. Home health agencies may struggle with understanding
the benefits of technology adoption and how it will “work with” traditional
check-ins. The downside of not
implementing a communication platform unfortunately weakens an agency’s
positioning and performance amongst patients, family caregivers, and referral
sources. Without being able to safely communicate with patients via
HIPAA-compliant messaging, home health agencies may negatively impact their ability to:
Address patients’ questions and issues in a timelier
manner
Drive deeper patient engagement on a day-to-day
basis
Motivate adherence to the treatment plan and lower
the risk of rehospitalization
Earn recognition as being an innovative and
patient-centric partner in their community
Increase referrals from hospitals, SNFs, and
physicians
Introducing technology into the communications between home
health agency staff and patients may be seen as a potential interference to
building and sustaining meaningful clinician-patient relationships. However,
the use of technology – specifically a communications platform – allows nurses
to more effectively perform their clinical responsibilities and more
efficiently keep patients engaged in their own care. The benefits of using technology to strengthen
communications are many.
Engaged patients
are more invested in their outcomes:
Patients who are engaged in their care are more aware of their
day-to-day changes in their condition and more likely to ask their clinician
questions if there are emerging concerns and issues. Using a communication
platform to reach out to a home health clinician can mitigate trips to the ER
and keep a patient on track with the appropriate steps in their care.
Engaged patients
are more satisfied with their care. With easy access to their clinicians
before/after scheduled appointments, patients are more satisfied as they are
less anxious about accessing care if/when there is an immediate need. Family
caregivers also appreciate the access to expert care afterhours and on the
weekends. As a result, the family member and/or the patient is more apt to
first contact their home health clinician team instead of immediately (and
almost instinctively) heading to the ER.
Engaged
patients are boosting your bottom line.
As the PDGM model is realized in 2020, agencies are more concerned with
delivering care that is patient-centric yet cost-contained. To minimize
penalties and maximize outcomes, referral sources are prioritizing home health
agencies which can show how they are engaging patients, increasing satisfaction
scores, and lowering readmission rates especially within the initial 30 days
post-hospital discharge. With a communication platform and engagement strategy
in place, agencies are aligning themselves with these referral sources as they
share a like-minded objective – healthier and happier patients.
A communication platform can help optimize the experience for the patient and the home health agency as all stakeholders can stay in better and more frequent communication during the episode of care. Administrators can schedule and send out timely messages suited to the patient’s condition and care. Ongoing communications include appointment reminders, adherence triggers, and diet/exercise recommendations.
Patients can also safely use the platform’s HIPAA-compliant email, text, SMS, and secure message to reach their home health clinicians regarding questions or issues. The essence of the in-person clinician-patient relationship remains intact during the video-based virtual check-ins. The patient’s family members can also be included in the virtual visits to drive better understanding of the patient’s progress and next steps.
Data is key to allowing administrator the ability to assess
each patient’s level of interaction with each communication and the cadence of
touchpoints. As needed, the administrator has the flexibility to adjust the
compliance messaging to better engage (or re-engage) the patient. If there are
concerns about non-compliance, the home health agency can decide if a more
immediate intervention (e.g., call, in-home visit, or transfer to the ED is necessary.
Using a combination of messaging and video touchpoints, a
communication platform can help a home health agency increase satisfaction and
outcomes for the patient while actively reducing the number, length, and
related costs/penalties of hospital stays. The coordinated plan to engage
patients throughout the episode of care helps agencies minimize any “what if”
scenario for the future of their agency, their reputation, their staff and most
importantly, the agency’s impact in their region and community.
Vyne Medical announces an agreement with INTEGRIS Health for implementation of its Trace communication management platform. Oklahoma’s largest not-for-profit health system will implement Trace solutions across the system’s eight acute care hospitals and centralized access center.
The Trace platform encompasses voice recording, electronic faxing and image capture to automate and manage communication surrounding patient care. Data is digitized, indexed to the patient record and centralized for enterprise access and exchange. INTEGRIS will use Trace solutions to standardize and monitor key patient communication events and support its consumer financial engagement strategy.
“Trace solutions will help ensure the quality of our patient interactions prior to admission, while capturing valuable consumer insights contained in phone calls, emails, faxes and other revenue cycle communications,” said Susan Garcia, vice president of revenue cycle at INTEGRIS. “A digital audit trail of these interactions will support our goal of providing seamless service across all INTEGRIS facilities. It provides the objective data we were missing to better manage the entire patient encounter.”
Patient access team members will use Trace software to support daily activities at INTEGRIS hospitals and its centralized access center. Associates will record scheduling, preregistration and patient financial counseling phone calls with patients. Face-to-face recording will be implemented to record in-person patient encounters in registration, financial counseling and discharge planning. The Trace Quality Assurance solution will be used to review and score recordings.
Lindy Benton
“Forward-thinking health systems are investing to optimize patient encounters and identify new opportunities to improve consumer engagement,” said Lindy Benton, Vyne CEO and president. “We are excited to partner with INTEGRIS to reduce the cost of operations and improve KPIs by automating and leveraging data from these exchanges.”
With admitting physicians, INTEGRIS plans to automate delivery of faxed physician orders to eliminate paper and manual processes involved with faxing. Trace voice solutions will also be used to record pre-admission phone calls with physician offices. To improve communication with payers, INTEGRIS will document pre-authorization inquiries via payer portals and record payer voicemails granting approval for services. Medical records faxed to health plans will also be captured, along with the date and time stamp of delivery. Proof of these exchanges will help INTEGRIS reduce claim denials and improve reimbursement.
Cardiovascular diseases remain the number one killer of people in the world, resulting in 31 percent of all global deaths (17.9 million per year), and are the most expensive condition to treat. However, AI and machine learning technologies are being developed to make care pathways, treatment and real-time visualization of cardiac anomalies and subsequent therapy more effective. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities may provide numerous advantages over traditional analytics and clinical decision-making techniques, and cardiology is likely to benefit tremendously from these advancements as they mature.
Stuart Long
“As machine learning-based algorithms become more precise and accurate by interacting with data and programmed information, these technologies will allow care teams to gain unprecedented insights into diagnostics, care processes, treatment variability and patient outcomes, especially in regard to cardiac care,” said Stuart Long, CEO of InfoBionic, the leading digital health company that created the MoMe Kardia remote cardiac monitoring platform.
“AI algorithm-based cardiac devices can procure tremendous amounts of data, providing for the ability to match up what physicians are seeing to long-term patterns and possibly detect subtle improvements that can impact care,” noted Long.
Leveraging AI for clinical decision support, risk scoring and early alerting is one of the most promising areas of development for this revolutionary approach to data analysis. Powering new tools and systems can help make clinicians more aware of nuances, more efficient when delivering care, and more likely to curb a patient’s developing health problems.[1]
AI is ushering in new clinical quality and breakthroughs in patient care. For example, at the Cleveland Clinic[2], a customized algorithm developed by clinicians analyzes data, including blood pressure, heart rate and oxygen saturation levels, to flag the patients that are at highest risk of deterioration. The ultimate goal is to provide front-line clinicians notice of serious cardiac events before they happen. Moreover, the precision now possible with cardiovascular imaging, combined with “big data” from the electronic health record and pathology, is likely to lead to tremendous cases of cardiac disease management and personalized therapy[3].
Healthcare consulting firm, Frost & Sullivan, projects a 40 percent growth rate[4] for AI in healthcare between 2016 and 2021, and said AI has the potential to improve outcomes by as much as 40 percent, while reducing the costs of treatment by as much as 50 percent.
Data driven medical care with connected devices is now the norm. Patient monitors, IV pumps, MRI machines, and infusions pumps all behave like computers with the ability to monitor patient conditions in real time, share data and even automatically adjust dosages. Although all of these innovations are improving in-patient care, their ability to communicate over internal computer networks has introduced new vulnerabilities to cyber attacks.
The health risks are high. Hackers can infiltrate devices and tamper with doses or even make devices show false data, leading doctors to the wrong diagnosis. Attackers can also hold electronic medical records ransom, causing delays in procedures required to treat patients.
The invisible threat
The biggest obstacle to securing medical devices is the simple fact that many of them are hidden. Hospitals often don’t have full visibility into which medical devices they have, so they aren’t aware of all the vulnerabilities. You can’t tell if your MRI is insecure if you don’t keep a full inventory of all the medical devices and all information necessary to assess the relative security risk.
Some hospitals rely on manual methods such as Excel spreadsheets to maintain an inventory of medical equipment. However, electronic files maintained by humans can’t keep pace with the growing number of the devices, and all the changes and updates that occur on an ongoing basis.
Often medical devices are added to the network without notifying security professionals and going through the necessary cautionary procedures. Many departments add equipment with the noble aim of improving patient care without notifying IT, since they are simply following the doctor’s orders and doctors are king. Something as simple as browsing for a local restaurant at a nurse’s station can put the hospital at risk if the computer isn’t adequately secured.
The world of healthcare is changing and those changes impact how we deliver care, our approach to engaging patients and the relationships between stakeholders across the healthcare value chain. Each day, we witness advances in genomics, imaging and pharmacology, and learn about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to drive these advances. Indeed, healthcare is in the midst of a major revolution and AI seems to be at the very core of this transformation. How much of the AI story is hype and how much is real?
Innovaccer Inc., a San Francisco-based healthcare data activation company, is hosting a breakthrough AI webinar on June 20 with guest speakers Dr. Peter Lee, corporate vice president, Microsoft Healthcare, and Stephen K. Klasko MD, MBA, president and CEO, Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health, who will be discussing the new healthcare domains of AI, and it’s “never imagined” impact. They will be joined by webinar moderator, David Nace MD, chief medical officer at Innovaccer.
The use of AI in healthcare has lagged behind other industries, in large part because of the lack of comprehensive, pristine data. The webinar, titled “Beyond Interoperability: Data Activation and Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare,” will focus on the recent AI hype, tease fact from fiction, and explain how advances in data activation can solve the accuracy and interoperability problems in the space.
Dr. Lee has extensive experience in managing the process of going from basic research to commercial impact. Past illustrative examples include the deep neural networks for simultaneous language translation in Skype, next-generation IoT technologies, and innovative silicon and post-silicon computer architectures for Microsoft’s cloud. He also has a history of advancing more “out of the box” technical efforts, such as experimental under-sea data centers, augmented-reality experiences for HoloLens and VR devices, digital storage in DNA, and social chatbots such as XiaoIce and Tay.
Lee is a member of the board of directors for the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine. He served on President’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity. And, previously, as an office director at DARPA, he led efforts that created operational capabilities in advanced machine learning, crowdsourcing, and big-data analytics, such as the DARPA Network Challenge and Nexus 7.
Under Dr. Klasko’s leadership, Jefferson Health has grown from three hospitals in 2015 to 14 hospitals today. His 2017 merger of Thomas Jefferson University with Philadelphia University created a pre-eminent professional university that includes top-20 programs in fashion, design and health professions, coupled with the first design-thinking curriculum in a medical school, conducting the nation’s leading research on empathy, an essential component of medicinal practice that is often overlooked in the academic setting. As a disruptive leader in the academic ecosystem, Dr. Klasko brings a valuable point of view to the Innovaccer Strategic Advisory Council.
Few healthcare leaders doubt that insights made available through precision medicine and genomics have the potential to vastly improve care and outcomes.
But the industry struggles to overcome numerous barriers that, at first glance, seem to obstruct providers’ ability to fully leverage precision medicine. There is no question that obstacles exist, but a well-considered strategy can help providers move quickly down a forward path.
Let us consider the six primary obstacles to leveraging precision medicine to its fullest:
Provider education and expertise. Precision medicine, as an influencer at the point of care, is a nascent discipline. Few physicians practicing today were thoroughly educated in genomics (the depth of training is increasing, however, according to a 2017 article in the Association of American Medical Colleges News). Physicians find themselves in a position of educating themselves quickly, especially as the FDA approves more targeted immunotherapies and treatments. In addition, because of the rise of direct-to-consumer tests, patients themselves are demanding doctors factor this information into their clinical decision making.
Slow-to-change standards of care. Without a doubt, delivery of healthcare must be evidence-based. Genomic science has introduced so many advances in such a short period of time, however, that many physicians remain bound by approaches rapidly becoming outdated. The industry must find ways to deliver new findings into the clinical workflow reliably and quickly, so providers can utilize the best approach in each patient encounter.
Limited time to process new data. Physicians are already presented with more data than they can effectively manage. Genomics represents an entirely new and voluminous data set. To deliver any value, this information must be rendered useful and readily available within the EHR. Access must be smooth and seamless so physicians are not forced to leave their workflow to hunt for relevant insights.
Foreign nomenclature. Currently, genomic results are returned in PDFs (not as discrete data), rendered in vocabulary common to genomic researchers and scientists. It must be “translated” into meaningful clinical nomenclature and then integrated into the current workflow to be fully useable.
Regulatory and liability concerns. Genomic results do not represent a snapshot in time the way phenotypical information might. A patient’s genetic variant could impact care decisions well into the future as the individual’s condition changes and genomic science advances. How does a provider store and manage genomic data, making sure that its very existence does not create liability issues in the years ahead?
Lack of or sluggish reimbursement. Payer policies and guidelines lag behind discoveries related to precision medicine. What reimbursement exists varies greatly from payer to payer and is founded on disparate understandings of medical necessity. While payment is becoming more common, physicians nevertheless must consider the financial impact of ordering a genomic test – and what they will do if the results indicate that an expensive or uncommon treatment is the best choice for a particular patient.
By Chris Talbot, senior vice president of marketing and business development, Ascom.
Chris Talbot
More than 4,900 U.S. hospitals participate in the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems Survey (HCAHPS), including 3,529 that received star ratings in the most recent quarterly update. These ratings reflect an effort by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to help consumers make informed choices about their care, putting more decision-making and purchasing power in their hands.
Because star ratings are expected to play an increasing role in helping consumers choose hospitals, it is important to understand these metrics and what hospitals can do to improve their performance.
Toward that end, Ascom created a comprehensive, time series database of hospital HCAHPS performance.
Changes to hospital Star Ratings over time
Leveraging our database, we conducted a year-over-year analysis of star ratings for all participating hospitals, providing insights into how star ratings change over time as well as clues to what it may take to improve performance.
As shown in the table below, our analysis revealed that star ratings tend to be sticky. In our year-over- year comparison across all hospitals, 61 percent of ratings remained unchanged. Overall, only 18 percent of ratings improved over a 12-month period, while 21 percent declined.
Why Star Ratings are slow to change
There are two main reasons that hospitals’ star ratings tended not to change over a 12-month period.
Because the quarterly HCAHPS results include four quarters’ worth of survey data, it can take a while for improvements to show up in the ratings. Even if a hospital achieves significant improvements in its most recent quarter, that quarter’s results are combined with the previous three quarters’ poorer results when they are reported by CMS.
There is also the difficulty of the task at hand. It’s not just a matter of providing excellent patient care – which is difficult enough; it’s also a matter of providing this level of care at the highest level of consistency.
Consistency is the key to improvement
Consistency is important at two levels. The first is across the HCAHPS domains. While HCAHPS monitors several different individual domains such as care transition, cleanliness, etc., they all add up to a total experience across each individual patient’s journey.
Our correlation analysis between all the linear mean scores for all HCAHPS domains found that if a patient’s satisfaction with one domain was high, then satisfaction with all domains tended to be high and vice versa. This in turn drove overall satisfaction with the hospital, and patient likelihood to recommend the hospital to others.
