- Open Source Tools Provide Control Over HIT Multi-Cloud Environments
By streaming data on patient care like forecasted demand, transfers between facilities, care progression, and discharge planning, staff can direct resources from the control center to areas of high need and give healthcare providers critical information in real time.
“When you have a complex healthcare system with nine facilities spread over a geographic area, with different specialties and services offered at different sites, it becomes increasingly important to be able to see the whole picture at once when you're trying to coordinate care, improved quality, match resources with needs, and help move people through their hospitalization in an efficient and beneficial manner. It's like air traffic control in a sense,” explained Matt Metsker, division director of mission control at CHI Franciscan.
“We have the centralized staffing office, a transfer center, patient placement team, we have a physician on duty, someone called a clinical expediter, and an ambulance coordinator,” Metsker told HITInfrastructure.com.
The system uses AI algorithms to identify potential issues, enabling care teams to solve problems and improve care rather than react when issues arise. CHI Franciscan is the first hospital system in the state of Washington, and the fifth globally, to use this technology.
“The clinical control system is hosted on the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform, which is a pretty great deal. So, we were able to work with GE and Microsoft on the project,” Metsker said.
“The IT folks basically set up a point-to-point circuit, a private extension of the CHI Franciscan network, and then they bridged it to the Azure cloud platform. We have the data in mission control, but also the individuals at each of the nine sites could pull it up on their desktop or iPad and be able to see the same data. This increases transparency across our entire healthcare system so we're all working from the same level of knowledge and the same understanding,” he related.
Analytic Tiles Provide Data on Different Hospital Topics
The clinical control center houses an 18-screen video wall with 12 analytic tiles, or apps, that provide real-time data from each hospital. Each tile covers a different topic.
“One of the tiles is the capacity snapshot tile that shows us bed capacity and staffing across the nine hospitals. I can tell you how many ICU beds are available for patients, how well those beds are staffed, and how many rooms with specific capabilities are available. We can look at medical rooms, telemetry rooms, and all those things,” Metsker explained.
“Some of the titles have an artificial intelligence or machine learning capability. For example, with the census forecast tile, we can look at what the hospital census is predicted to be at 48 hours or 72 hours from now with relative accuracy. The way this is accomplished is by giving the system data from the past and different variables to consider like day of the week, weather, previous census. It actually gets more accurate over time based on machine learning,” he said.
A big benefit of the clinical control center is the breaking down of silos. “Instead of having nine facilities that are doing their best to work together, now everyone has the same actionable data. We're all able to speak the same language to each other so we can move patients through their hospitalizations more efficiently, we can keep them safer, and we can better match our resources to patient needs,” Metsker concluded.
