Becker's Hospital Review

50 INNOVATION OSF Healthcare: Innovation hubs starting to take off By Noah Schwartz P eoria, Ill.-based OSF Healthcare's innovation hubs are starting to bear fruit. The OSF Innovation hubs feature scientists, engineers, designers, project managers and process improvement experts working to improve care and reduce costs from the Jump Education & Simulation Center in Peoria. The hubs are designed to give employees spaces to discuss ideas that could lead to systemwide innovations, according to a Sept. 14 news release from the health system. Once the hubs are operational, they hold Trailblazer Challenges, an opportunity to crowdsure new healthcare innovations and pitch new ideas. The innovations hubs could be used for a program where patients can be referred for a virtual reality session, designed to give them better understanding of how chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is affecting their lungs. "You learn about things outside of healthcare, like software design and coding and the amount of money and resources it takes to create some of these apps," Zack VanKeulen, director of emergency services for OSF Healthcare Saint Paul Medical Center in Mendota, Ill., said in the release, referring to the program. "And those things may not be possible, so you have to bite off a smaller piece than you originally thought was possible. But in the end, if you can innovate and make a change that positively impacts the patient's experience, then it's a win-win situation." The health system plans to have local businesses and communities use the innovation hubs as a way to power growth. Local students will have access to the VR technology in the hub to explore careers in healthcare. n Banner Health's big bet on population health By Giles Bruce P hoenix-based Banner Health is making a big bet on population health as it aims to use data to improve patient outcomes and cut costs. e health system has partnered with health cloud company Innovac- cer to improve its data analytics and care coordination capabilities. It's been helping identify care gaps among patients from its value-based care division, which includes about 1.4 million patients from Arizona and Colorado, Banner Health officials told Becker's. "It's saying to the providers, 'Hey, it looks like Jen hasn't had her an- nual mammogram. e last one she did was back in 2019. You need to talk to her about it,'" said Jen Brooks, vice president of population health, value-based care and the administrative services organization at Banner Health. "And this allows the provider to then prompt the patient to close those gaps." Banner Health is an Oracle Cerner shop, but not all of its network providers use the EHR vendor. So it needed a solution that could scale across its entire insurance division, which includes its joint venture with Aetna. Aer selecting Innovaccer, the health system expanded its care coordination program from about 50 offices to more than 200. With the EHR-agnostic platform, care reminders pop up on the EHR for providers to see. Banner Health also plans to implement a tool where chronic-disease care coordinators can communicate with pri- mary care providers through the EHR. "Ensuring that that whole care team is really working together, and that we know what's going on with that member when we're interact- ing with them, is extremely important," Ms. Brooks said. "It's probably one of the biggest problems in healthcare." Banner is focusing on value-based care patients for now but may eventually consider a broader cloud migration, Ms. Brooks said. But the health system is seeing results from the initial cloud shi. Early stats show about an 18 percent care-gap closure among providers us- ing the in-office workflow tool, she said. "Traditionally, in the healthcare setting, we've been really good at un- derstanding what's happening at the time you come and talk to me. But it's a little hard for me to know what you're doing when you're not in front of me in my office," she said. "And this platform is allowing us to start to see, know and understand that better. If you're just relying on the patient to tell you everything that they've done outside of visit- ing you, you're going to get an incomplete picture." is system automates data that Banner Health used to have to in- put and crunch manually via comma-separated value files, Microso Excel and pivot tables, said Greg Sanderson, senior director of pop- ulation health management at Banner Health. e health system can now identify graphical trends over a number of years. "ere's a visualization that's presented that, quote-unquote, 'tells a story.' Whereas before, if all you have is rows and columns of num- bers, it's exceedingly difficult to get that total picture," Mr. Sanderson said. "And you can click on those outliers to say, 'Maybe I need to start to drill down a little bit deeper to see if I can figure out what's causing that?' Or, 'Do I need to engage more with a specific provider or group to try to see what we can do to make a better positive change with those numbers?'" For Banner Health, the next step is to speed up this type of data so it's available in real time. "e faster we can get information and exchange it, the faster the busi- ness can adapt and move," Ms. Brooks said. "And that's probably one of our biggest barriers. It's still kind of the state of the space for health- care IT in general." n

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