A new EHR-integrated predictive tool developed by Intermountain Healthcare helps accurately predict health outcomes for respiratory patients.
Intermountain Healthcare recently tested the effectiveness of its newly-developed Summit Score tool, an EHR-integrated risk calculator, and found the tool serves as a more accurate way to predict clinical health outcomes for respiratory patients.
Researchers at the Utah-based health system developed the tool to improve the accuracy of risk calculation scores given to patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. These risk calculation scores are used to predict likely health outcomes for patients with the disease.
Around 16 million patients across the country have been diagnosed with COPD, and 3.2 million people die of the disease worldwide each year.
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“The benefit of a calculated, objective score for physicians is that they can look at the score and get a quantified, repeatable value that will indicate where the patient is as far as their health,” said Benjamin D. Horne, PhD, director of cardiovascular and genetic epidemiology at Intermountain Healthcare. “That can help indicate to a clinician whether they should give the standard of care or if they need to be a little bit more aggressive.”
The Summit Score tool leverages data in patient EHRs to integrate a variety of risk factors into patients’ risk calculation scores. Data included in this analysis includes age, body mass index, smoking history, prior instances of COPD hospitalization, heart attack history, heart failure history, diabetes diagnosis, and use of antithrombotic or antiarrhythmic medications.
“Current risk scores help guide care, but the scores that are typically used are easy to remember and based on simple, often inexact calculations you can do in your head,” Horne said. “They’re not terribly useful and they don’t do all that well at predicting a prognosis.”
The EHR-integrated health IT tool predict patient risk of a sudden exacerbation of COPD symptoms, hospital readmissions, and mortality on a scale of 0-30. Zero to 13 on the scale is indicative of low risk, 14 to 19 signals moderate risk, and 20 to 30 indicates high risk. The tool validates scores twice to ensure the highest level of score accuracy.
“Instead of using a risk score that doesn’t work all that well, you can use a risk score that’s consistently better at predicting outcomes where the computer does the work for you,” said Horne.
The tool is designed to help doctors improve treatment plan development and administer more accurate, better-informed patient care. Summit Score validation draws on a data set from more than 44,000 patients enrolled in the SUMMIT clinical trials at Intermountain Healthcare.
Several research teams and health IT developers have tested and released new EHR-integrated tools designed to assist in improving treatment for specific diseases in recent years.
In 2018, a team of researchers developed a quality improvement program combining EHR-integrated tools and patient engagement strategies to improve care quality for patients with chronic kidney disease.
Over a one-year period, researchers observed 153 primary care physicians treating 3,947 high-risk patients and 3,744 low-risk patients with stage III chronic kidney disease across 13 ambulatory health centers at Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates in Massachusetts.
Participating physicians received a set of EHR-integrated alerts through the practice’s Epic EHR system providing recommendations for risk-appropriate chronic kidney disease care.
Ultimately, researchers found low-risk patients who had participated in the quality improvement program were 25 percent more likely to receive urine microalbumin testing than patients not enrolled in the program.
Furthermore, high-risk patients were over 10 percent more likely to see a nephrologist during the one-year period observed during the study than those not enrolled in the program.
Date: May 27, 2019
Source: EHR Intelligence