Community Health Systems Inc. is taking small wins and cumulative learnings from a handful of technology initiatives that are based in part on the health systems operator’s COVID-19 experiences.
Franklin, Tennessee-based CHS, which operates 76 hospitals in 15 states and more than 1,000 care sites, over the past two years has established partnerships with remote patient monitoring service Cadence, perinatal software company PeriGen, the virtual session company Avasure and, most recently, Mindoula for virtual behavioral health services. Some of them are starting to grow: More than 5,000 people have signed up for Cadence’s service (which, thanks to word of mouth among CHS medical leaders across the country, is building waiting lists for new markets), while that PeriGen’s early warning system has been implemented in more than 50 hospitals.
Speaking on the sidelines of the recent Nashville Healthcare Sessions conference, Healthcare Innovation President and Chief Medical Officer Lynn Simon, MD, MBA, said Healthcare innovation The company’s initiatives focus on two simple questions: Do the technologies improve the quality of care and improve the satisfaction of the CHS workforce by smoothing workflows and allowing them to work closer to the top of the license?
Collaborating with Avasure, for example, allows hospital staff of all qualifications to focus on higher-value interactions because Avasure team members can monitor a dozen or more patients simultaneously. And Cadence’s remote monitoring results in just a handful of escalations per 100 patients monthly instead of hundreds of routine but inefficient phone calls to the office.
The next step for Simon and his team: turning the smaller-scale successes of these projects into truly big achievements.
“My goal is to figure out how to combine solutions so that change can be transformative rather than incremental,” Simon said.
There won’t be a single metric that CHS must meet in order to say it has met that goal, Simon said. Instead, each project’s varying levels of complexity and variety of indicators mean they are working on separate timelines and targeting their own objectives. But over time, Simon added, the goal is to measure the cumulative profits of all projects and be able to say that one part of the company is “operating at a totally different level than it was before.”
When asked about a baseball analogy, Simon says it’s still early innings, but CHS has the potential to put up a winning record.
“We have a team with several veterans and some highly recruited new talent (including some with new skills like data science). [and] AI,” he said. “So even though we’re in the early stages of our journey, we already have a couple of races on the board and a solid lineup (of people and projects) waiting to step forward.”
Of course, there’s a business angle to CHS’s work here, too: Despite struggling with very high travel nursing costs during and after the peak of the pandemic, company leaders have in recent years reduced labor costs of the company as part of the income as I have invested in clinical quality. During the first half of this year, salaries and benefits accounted for 43.4 percent of net income, up from more than 45 percent pre-COVID.
Further progress on that front will have an impact: Based on CHS’s annual revenue of more than $12 billion, improving the ratio of labor costs to revenue by half a percentage point is equivalent to $60 million or more.
Innovation of the kind Simon focuses on was a consistent theme at Sessions’ inaugural conference hosted by the Nashville Health Care Council. Panel topics included adapting artificial intelligence tools, collaborating with other system stakeholders, and the growing consumerization of care. Throughout the conversations there were comments about healthcare organizations’ pandemic experiences (specifically the speed with which many were forced to change workflows and how regulators also needed to be flexible) and how to build on the momentum gained. during management during COVID.
“The pandemic drove a lot of changes,” said Neil de Crescenzo, CEO of UnitedHealth’s OptumInsight group, who joined that company through its acquisition of Change Healthcare a year ago. “This made people think, ‘We normally did things at 1x speed. Then we did things at 0.1x with COVID. ‘Can we do things now at 0.5x?’”
Simon echoed that thought in the conference’s closing panel when he noted that technology increasingly has the power to remake healthcare rather than simply move work from one environment to another.
“We have to change and we have the tools,” he said. “That makes me very optimistic.”
