You’re working in the ER when a patient comes in with severe congestive heart failure. You look up their file and find out they were discharged within the past 25 days. Was there a way this could have been avoided? You need to figure out where the breakdowns occurred in the patient’s care so you and your team can make the right decisions to avoid such as fast readmission again. What do you do?
This is just a simulation from medical education company CaseNetwork but it’s designed to mirror the kind of situations professionals are put in ever day. The idea is to help medical professionals collaborate and communicate with each other and with the patient. The CareCases simulator is designed to improve care coordination to help providers avoid the reimbursement penalties facing hospitals with higher than average readmission rates for chronic conditions like congestive heart failure, pneumonia and myocardial infarction.
CaseNetwork CEO and founder Dr. Jeffrey Levy is a Philadelphia area medical education entrepreneur.
“We are specialists in case-based problems, case-based decision-oriented learning using electronic media, and that really helps engage physicians,” said Levy in a phone interview. He observed that social media, technology advances and mobile devices have created ways to make the medical education experience more immediate.
The platform for mobile devices and computers simulates the readmission experience with patient encounters. It is designed to help different members of a care team understand their role. It evaluates and reports on individual and team readiness with immediate feedback.
Among the competencies it seeks to underline are discharge plans, disease management, medication reconciliation, care transition management and education. Theoretically a hospital administrator can look at a dashboard to evaluate how well care team members are doing in these areas.
“This is an interdisciplinary team-based approach to medical education covering areas like discharge and transition issues. It is the entire team — not just the physician and not just the residents,” Levy said.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Additionally, the company is developing an education platform for residents as part of a move by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education in 2002 to require young physicians to demonstrate six core competencies: medical knowledge, patient care, practice-based learning and improvement, interpersonal and communication skills, professionalism and system-based practice. It’s about ensuring that patient care is compassionate, appropriate and effective for treating health problems, demonstrating professional ethics, investigating and evaluating their patient care practices.
The platform is packed with case studies, which are structured as decision-oriented learning modules that are also interactive. Users can watch videos of simulated encounters between healthcare professionals and patient actors and other healthcare professionals to develop and improve their communication skills with constant feedback for decisions made by the user. It also makes use of social media to encourage peer to peer collaboration. Big data is another feature it uses so users and resident administrators can see how they are performing in relation to other residents in the hospital.
The plan is to structure the platform around different practice areas. It expects to begin releasing these modules in July.
