Texas Hospital Association Dashboard Offers Risk, Cost Data

The Texas Hospital Association has agreed to a joint venture with health IT vendor IllumiCare to roll out a new tool for physicians. The new dashboard offers an unusual but powerful mix of risk data and real-time cost information.

According to THA, physician orders represent 87% of hospital expenses, but most know little about the cost of items they order. The new dashboard, Smart Ribbon, gives doctors information on treatment costs and risk of patient harm at the point of care. THA’s assumption is that the data will cause them to order fewer and less costly tests and meds, the group says.

To my mind, the tool sounds neat. IllumiCare’s Smart Ribbon technology doesn’t need to be integrated with the hospital’s EMR. Instead, it works with existing HL-7 feeds and piggybacks onto existing user authorization schemes. In other words, it eliminates the need for creating costly interfaces to EMR data. The dashboard includes patient identification, a timer if the patient is on observational status, a tool for looking up costs and tabs providing wholesale costs for meds, labs and radiology. It also estimates iatrogenic risks resulting from physician decisions.

Unlike some clinical tools I’ve seen, Smart Ribbon doesn’t generate alerts or alarms, which makes it a different beast than many other clinical decision support tools. That doesn’t mean tools that do generate alerts are bad, but that feature does set it apart from others.

We’ve covered many other tools designed to support physicians, and as you’d probably guess, those technologies come in all sizes. For example, last year contributor Andy Oram wrote about a different type of dashboard, PeraHealth, a surveillance system targeting at-risk patients in hospitals.

PeraHealth identifies at-risk patients through analytics and displays them on a dashboard that doctors and nurses can pull up, including trends over several shifts. Its analytical processes pull in nursing assessments in addition to vital signs and other standard data sets. This approach sounds promising.

Ultimately, though, dashboard vendors are still figuring out what physicians need, and it’s hard to tell whether their market will stay alive. In fact, according to one take from Kalorama Information, this year technologies like dashboarding, blockchain and even advanced big data analytics will be integrated into EMRs.

As for me, I think Kalorama’s prediction is too aggressive. While I agree that many freestanding tools will be integrated into the EMR, I don’t think it will happen this or even next year. In the meantime, there’s certainly a place for creating dashboards that accommodate physician workflow and aren’t too intrusive. For the time being, they aren’t going away.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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