IMPATHIQ, empowering hospitals to improve health outcomes for patients experiencing chest pain while significantly reducing costs, is pleased to announce a successful installation of its innovative IQ Engine and Heart Pathway systems at the Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA) hospital system.
An academic community health system serving Cambridge, Somerville and Boston’s metro-north communities, CHA is utilizing IMPATHIQ’s groundbreaking health informatics technology to streamline chest pain care across its emergency departments, strengthening patient care while reducing the number of low-risk chest pain admissions.
“We’ve been using the IMPATHIQ system for a few months now in three emergency departments serving about 100,000 patients a year. We’re seeing the benefits of having real-time clinical feedback for doctors and physician assistants treating patients, and we’re using the data as part of our clinical and quality assessment for making administrative decisions downstream,” said Christopher Fischer, MD, Site Chief of Emergency Medicine at CHA Cambridge and Somerville Hospitals.
Cambridge Health Alliance utilizes EPIC for its Electronic Health Records.
CHA had been looking for a novel way to do clinical decision support for a while. One that enabled better analytics tracking of clinical decision support (CDS) so that overall adherence by clinical teams would improve and data from utilization of CDS could be used for quality improvement projects. Dr. Fischer reached out to a contact at Wake Forest University about the work Iltifat Husain, MD was leading at IMPATHIQ.
Dr. Husain’s team was taking a vastly different approach to CDS support within EHR by utilizing new platforms Cerner and EPIC had just made available to hospital systems. Building the relationship with Dr. Husain and learning more about IMPATHIQ’s Heart Pathway and IQ Engine, Dr. Fischer decided to implement a fully formed product as opposed to committing CHA time, energy, and bandwidth on building a system of its own.
From a clinical perspective, CHA wanted a system for real-time decision support that would be seamless at point of entry in a busy emergency room, to avoid pulling healthcare providers out of their workflow in an environment where they are taking care of multiple patients all at once. At the same time, CHA wanted to avoid having its information technology (IT) group have to do any heavy lifting during implementation or tweak the EMR which might have adverse effects on the system.
“It was as close to a plug-and-play system as we could have imagined. From both the clinician and IT points of view implementation was incredibly easy. Using the system, it’s not something that is a burden when you are working clinically. It provides actionable, useful decision making support, helping providers do risk evaluations every day,” Dr. Fischer said.
On the IT side, Dr. Fischer said Heart Pathway and the IQ Engine have caused zero problems, with no downtime or glitches.
“You literally hit the button, it pops up and works,” he added.
Using Heart Pathway is simple yet effective. When an emergency department patient complains of chest pain to his healthcare provider, the Heart Pathway web app is triggered automatically by the EHR or manually by the provider. IMPATHIQ’s IQ Engine and FHIR protocols launch Heart Pathway within the EHR environment, enabling the provider to enter patient history, symptoms, and ECG variables. In just seconds, Heart Pathway provides a risk assessment and clinical guidance to the provider, with documentation inserted into the EHR. The provider is able to care for the patient using his or her best clinical judgment and Heart Pathway guidance, and analytical insights are instantly accessible in real time through an administrative dashboard.
“Hospital administrators and physicians know that patients who come into ERs with chest pain often receive a wide variation in treatment depending on who is caring for them. Further, there is increased medical legal risk in managing chest pain patients, compounding this issue,” IMPATHIQ’s Dr. Husain said.
According to Dr. Husain, tools like Heart Score for risk stratification are not ideal because they are subjective, and research has shown they are inconsistent among clinicians. Heart Pathway is completely objective, asking discrete yes/no questions, and is based on validated peer reviewed published clinical research that was backed by millions of dollars of grant funding.
“Heart Pathway and the IQ Engine are designed to standardize clinical decision making to benefit patients, providers, and healthcare systems,” he explained.
IMPATHIQ’s IQ Engine and Heart Pathway systems take less than 20 hours to implement, and can all be done remotely. Whereas older resource-intensive processes required heavy capital investment and custom builds, the dynamic nature of the IQ Engine enables easier building and modification of pathways at a tenth of the cost with minimal drain on resources. With easy accessibility to EHR data like never before, hospital administrators can finally access data analytics on provider usage and patient scores to help standardize care across the entire healthcare system, with detailed information on physician compliance, distribution of scores, money savings and much more.
Heart Pathway has been validated in several published clinical studies showing results including a MACE (Major Adverse Cardiac Events) rate < 1%; reductions of greater than 12 hours in per-patient hospital length of stay; more than 40% reduction in “observation” status admissions for chest pain patients; and over $700 savings per patient utilization. It has also been validated by both Epic and Cerner and is available in both app stores for hospitals using either the Epic or Cerner electronic medical records systems.
For more information, visit www.impathiq.com or email info@impathiq.com.
About IMPATHIQ
IMPATHIQ is a groundbreaking human informatics company empowering hospitals to improve health outcomes for patients experiencing chest pain while significantly reducing costs. Our scalable, customizable IQ Engine data platform provides smart clinical decision support for doctors and their patients with real-time analytics and feedback, while our revolutionary Heart Pathway quickly and accurately identifies cardiac events to speed-up patient access to care and free-up emergency rooms. Implementation is unusually fast for hospital systems and medical staff, providing easy accessibility to EHR data like never before. To learn more visit www.impathiq.com.
