Penn Medicine Touts Success of Digital Care Coordination Platform

The Pennsylvania health system is pointing to a recent survey that shows the digital health tool, which is now marketed by a company spun out of Penn Medicine, improves real-time care coordination.

Penn Medicine is touting the results of a study showing the value of a digital workflow tool, developed at the health system, that allows providers to better coordinate care between teams.

The tool, called CareAlign, pulls data from the electronic health record and allows multiple providers to access from different locations and schedule services, such as tests and specialist consults. It’s designed to give the patient’s care team real-time access via mHealth devices to the patient’s care management plan as it’s designed and updated.

According to a study recently published in Applied Clinical Informatics, the digital health tool saw widespread use across three hospitals in 2016, and has been positively reviewed by clinicians in surveys taken in 2016 and 2018, with steady use over at least four years.

Penn Medicine has since spun the service into a digital health company called CareAlign, which markets the tool to other health systems.

“This demonstrates that there is a definite need for clinician-facing platforms that build on to the investment health systems have made in electronic health records to help clinicians be more efficient, improve communication and streamline documentation,” Subha Airan-Javia, MD, an adjunct associate professor of Medicine in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and a former associate chief medical information officer at Penn Medicine who launched the company and now serves as its CEO, said in a recent press release.

The project points to a growing interest among healthcare organizations to develop their own digital health solutions to address long-standing gaps in care management and coordination, particularly as the technology becomes more sophisticated. Several health systems – including Penn Medicine – have set up their own digital innovation labs, and some have launched companies out of those labs to market their products.

It also highlights the need for innovative digital health solutions that can address gaps in care, particularly in inpatient settings where a patient with complex healthcare needs is being managing by a team of care providers not always in the same room, or even the same building. Through virtual care platforms and mHealth devices, those providers now have opportunities to collaborate and coordinate online.

According to executives, CareAlign was developed in 2014 in the health system’s Center for Health Innovation after Penn Medicine Chief Medical Information Officer C. William Hanson II, MD, asked Airan-Javia to design a tool that would “make the workflows around patient care easier and more efficient to manage.” The platform was originally designed to address hand-offs, then expanded to include overall care coordination, including digital rounding.

Airan-Javia and her team then introduced the tool to clinicians in Penn Medicine’s three Philadelphia hospitals. By 2020, they said, it had been adopted by 159 out of a possible 169 primary inpatient services.

“One way to interpret this finding is that users of this system are now able to review data to satisfy clinical questions more often, whereas, before, the accessibility of data made it more challenging,” Jacqueline Soegaard Ballester, MD, a surgical resident at Penn Medicine who served as lead author for the study, said in the press release. “Another interpretation is that with increasingly accessible data, more users are learning to incorporate this information into their work more often and in new ways. Increasing access to data may, in turn, help providers make more informed decisions and progress patient care more quickly.”

“Anything we can do to reduce clerical burden in healthcare is a step in the right direction,” she added. “That frees up clinicians to dedicate more time to non-clerical tasks and/or care for more patients. This is especially important given the increasing rates of burnout in the medical profession and the challenges we are facing amid the COVID-19 pandemic.”