Project Description
Care Management Platform
The goal of improving the quality of patient care while simultaneously lowering costs represents a significant challenge for most health delivery organizations. This is especially true now that the final payment and policy changes for hospital re-admissions from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) are in effect. Kaiser Health News reported that 2,610 hospitals face penalties from Medicare due to high readmission rates, with a projected overall cost of $428 million. In another study by Modern Healthcare, it was determined that roughly 1% of patients make up 22.7% of hospital costs. The data clearly indicates that better post-discharge and care coordination are necessary. A Care Management Platform can help solve these issues.
KRM Associates has long been in demand as an organization that can devise custom software solutions that are both functional and easy to use. And as a small company, we are able to create flexible, custom-tailored, and innovative solutions in order to help our customers overcome the challenges they are facing. From using new technology to extract health data from legacy systems, to integrating an open source medical record framework to manage patient records, the KRM team actively learns and implements new technologies and applies these skill-sets to federal and private applications, especially in the realm of Open Source software. Building on our expertise acquired working in health IT, we have created the HealtheMe® Care Management Platform to assist health delivery organizations, as well as patients and caregivers alike, in managing care recovery and chronic disease.
Concept and Architecture
Our HealtheMe® Care Management Platform is a prime example of our ability to create functional solutions that exceed client expectations. Stemming from a pilot project to explore improving population health by using personal health records systems, HealtheMe® continues to evolve and improve. It is a Care Coordination platform for use by either care coordinators from the healthcare organization or by family members and designated caretakers. Major capabilities include:
- A customizable portal built upon KRM’s Light Enterprise Application Framework (LEAF) utilizing the very best “applets” and features from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ Enterprise Health Management Platform (eHMP), such as workflow management, enhanced graphing support, and workspace customization;
- The ability to harmonize and display health information from many disparate data sources allowing patient data to be imported into the HealtheMe® platform via FHIR, CCDA or other standards from multiple EHRs.
- Workflows that can be defined within HealtheMe®, depending upon roles and relevant patient data, such as diagnosis codes or lab results.
- Views that can also be customized using a robust workspace manager, which allows the system to display the patient data pertinent to the role of the user or diagnosis of the patient.
Built to Extend
Because it uses LEAF as it’s application framework, the HealtheMe® care management platform is designed to be extensible. Using the robust Software Development Kit (SDK) provided with LEAF allows HealtheMe® to be customized to meet the needs of any health delivery organization and connect to a wide variety of data sources and devices. New “applets” can be rapidly created using the SDK and quickly snapped into the platform. Because of the extensibility of the HealtheMe® Care Management Platform, it has the ability to connect with a wide-variety of remote in-home monitoring systems and provide the data to care managers in a meaningful way. As a proof-of-concept, KRM has integrated the Amazon Echo Platform with HealtheMe®, allowing patients to use voice activated interactions to:
- Replay parts of their discharge instructions,
- Hear their medication schedules and instructions, or
- Listen to their medication side-effects and related information.
It is this customizability that gives HealtheMe® the power to adapt to any health delivery organization’s needs.