Health Catalyst offers predictive suite for patient safety

Seeking to improve patient safety in hospitals, Health Catalyst has released a module that uses predictive and text analytics to monitor and predict potential threats to patients.

Called the Patient Safety Monitor Suite: Surveillance Module, it’s intended to be combined with concurrent clinical review of data. The new offering is built on the company’s Data Operating System, which is its platform for delivering analytics to healthcare organizations.

In addition, the company announced that it has applied for certification as a patient safety organization with the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. As a PSO, Health Catalyst says it can collect patient safety events from its customers and then analyze them to gain new insights. As a PSO, member customers could contribute patient safety event information without fear of litigation.

The use of the new platform is intended to move patient safety efforts ahead to become preventive, not waiting for accidents to occur before action can be taken, says Stanley Pestotnik, the company’s vice president of patient safety products.

“The current approach to patient safety is like doing archeology—digging through ancient safety events to identify the causes of harm, which does nothing to help with the patient in the bed right now,” Pestotnik says.

“Unlike other approaches to using analytics within a PSO to identify and address episodes of patient harm, we monitor triggers in near real-time to reveal whether a patient is currently at risk for a safety event, so clinicians can intervene to prevent it,” he adds. “We provide constant vigilance; no patient encounter goes unnoticed.”

The company says its surveillance module identifies patterns of harm and proposes strategies to eliminate patient safety risks and hazards for current and future patients. It contends that the combination of predictive analytics, text analytics and near real-time data from multiple sources enables its suite to predict harm events and trigger a response while the patient is being treated.

Health Catalyst says it also plans to offer related patient safety professional services, including PSO services, such as safety data review, vulnerability assessment, “Culture of Safety” assessments and consulting, custom trigger development, outcomes improvement services, and safety collaboratives. And it’s working with clients to improve the suite with additional features.

Later this year, the surveillance module is expected to leverage additional AI and machine learning capabilities to learn from patterns of harm, significantly improving its ability to propose strategies to eliminate patient safety risks and hazards for current and future patients.