The Challenge
Accelerating Adoption of Evidence-Based Clinical Practices with Trisotech and Smile Digital Health
As the healthcare industry rapidly transitions to the HL7® FHIR® data standard, it is important to move beyond buzzwords and to talk about concrete use cases. Interoperability, infinite scalability, and open yet secure accessibility all sound great in theory, but what do they offer for providers and for patients, both today and tomorrow?
One obvious target is the lag time seen between the emergence of new research and its adoption in clinical practice. Few would question the general desire to accelerate the adoption of evidence-based practices and the associated benefits to patients.
This lag time (once estimated to be 17 years) is a complex problem, which has been intensified by the lack of data standardization in healthcare. The inability for data to flow freely between various stakeholders creates unnecessary friction, from both providers and payers to patients.
The current lack of visibility and accessibility makes it difficult, if not impossible, to measure adherence to evidence-based practices. Practitioners, for their part, struggle to communicate the gaps new guidelines may contain or the ways in which they fall short in a clinical setting. Without a standardized way for practitioners to input patient data and for researchers and administrators to access that data, it remains impossible to create a truly data-driven system that ensures, and continuously improves, the quality and consistency of care patients receive.
Software applications built on top of the FHIR data standard are particularly well-suited to address these difficulties and reduce these delays.
The Solution
Accelerating the Adoption of Evidence-Based Best Practices
Data silos have plagued the healthcare industry for decades and slowed the adoption of best practices. Creating a standardized data layer and then standardizing access to that data using CDS Hooks is a powerful first step towards improving care. But the digital transformation becomes truly revolutionary when the right data can be put into the hands of healthcare practitioners at the right time and in the right place.
Enter Trisotech, a global leader in enterprise software and a founding member of BPM+ Health, a community initiative to improve the quality and consistency of healthcare delivery. In the healthcare industry, Trisotech is disrupting the healthcare industry by applying international modeling standards to clinical best practices, care pathways and workflows directly at the point of care. Trisotech specializes in providing modeling and automation solutions so their clients can easily define and deploy evidence-based practices. By leveraging the BPM+ Health standard notation (including BPMN, CMMN and DMN) and other open IT standards, Trisotech has developed evidence-based workflow and decision models that are human readable and machine automatable. While organizations can create their own, many are already available to providers including nearly 1,000 free customizable care pathways, clinical guidelines and healthcare decision calculators in the BPM+ Health standard. This empowers practitioners with up-to-date knowledge, accelerating adoption and ensuring greater consistency in the execution of care.
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On a more global, organizational level, providers are able to ensure a higher degree of standardization and compliance in their delivery of care across different hospitals and clinics, thus improving their quality of care. It also feeds data back into the best practices to “close the loop” needed to create a learning healthcare system. Trisotech visual models and automated services are fast and easy to change as regulatory requirements and new medications and procedures evolve.
Payers are also leveraging these products to automate procedures like medical necessity and pre-authorization determinations, leading to more efficient decision making and significant cost savings. By ensuring the correct information is collected at the outset, automated workflows help payers keep complete records in case of an audit. Health plan members benefit from a better experience as they can access the care they need with minimal delays and without surprises at the time of billing.
Smile provides the platform that allows this data to be stored securely, while also flowing seamlessly between legacy systems and new applications. The data can be written in FHIR the whole way and is used by Trisotech solutions without any reformatting or translation required. Smile has a built-in OAuth2/OpenID Connect server, so the central repository of information can be consumed via a single authentication protocol.
The combined Trisotech and Smile solution can be wrapped around electronic health records (EHR) and other data sources, adding value without diminishing the benefits of the EHR that are already in place. This opens up possibilities for providers to introduce new technologies that clinicians and patients alike can benefit from—from SMART on FHIR apps to connected devices—without being limited to a list of apps “approved” by their EHR vendor. This can drive the adoption
of technologies and services that interact with clinical data.
Conclusion
Greater Efficiency and Better Quality of Care
Currently, patients often receive delayed or suboptimal care simply because providers cannot track down the necessary information in a timely fashion. Traditionally, processes have been slow, manual and inefficient, and have given rise to the kind of ‘chart chasing’ that wastes clinicians’ time and costs the healthcare system billions each year.
With the general thrust toward interoperability and data standardization, the status quo is finally starting to change. The Clinical Quality Language (CQL) is one of the standards that is helping to achieve this, especially in healthcare systems using FHIR. Smile is a leader in CQL adoption and is the first FHIR server to have integrated CQL, while Trisotech leverages that standard and CDS Hooks which allows for Clinical Decision Support to be embedded in most medical encounter systems to further automate and streamline processes.
These changes help all stakeholders. Payers receive more complete and correct information, allowing them to make better decisions with greater efficiency. The onerous administrative burden currently on providers gets lifted, allowing them to focus more of their time on providing quality care. Finally, patients get relieved from the stress and anxiety of waiting to hear if their procedures have been approved and can start receiving higher quality care—with a lot less lag time.
As standardized data and interoperability become the norm, providers and payers are seizing the opportunity to proactively shape the future of healthcare. The time to innovate is now. If you’re interested in learning more, get in touch with Smile or request a demo of Trisotech.