Digital health startup QPID Health recently announced that its EHR augmentation software was adopted by Silver Hill Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Connecticut that hopes to glean better insights on behavioral health patterns of an often-challenging patient population.
QPID, a Boston-based startup founded in 2012, said its software will help the 129-bed hospital capture and display an “at-a-glance view of clinically relevant information.” The hospital, meanwhile, said the software will help it maximize EHR data and spot patterns for improved treatment on the psychiatric side, which has been a growing focus as the health system as a whole looks to curb hospitalizations.
The collaboration will also include a behavioral health portal with the use of QPID’s Cohort App, which identifies and collects information across various groups of patients. The QPID platform will mine data to track compliance and quality metrics related to what’s known as hospital based inpatient psychiatric services, a program specifically geared toward the safety of psych patients.
While psychiatric facilities face similar challenges to all hospitals in EHR implementation and data usage, there are some unique elements that can be particularly beneficial for the setting, said Dr. Sigurd Ackerman, president and medical director of Silver Hill, which is spread across 43 acres through 11 different sights in New Canaan. The hospital, an affiliate of Yale New Haven’s School of Medicine Psychiatry, is fully equipped with a Medsphere EHR system, essentially a commercialized version of the VA’s system.
“We still have a big problem that most hospitals of every kind have – much of the information in the EHR is text,” Dr. Ackerman said. “It’s not structured information bits. And so even though we can put the text into the EHR, up until now there has been no way to survey that information and retrieve that information.”
That’s where QPID comes in, he said, with the ability to retrieve data from text tailored to its psych-specific needs.
“If we want to know how many patients were discharged on anti-psychotic drugs, we can do that in the blink of an eye versus hours and hours,” Dr. Ackerman 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.
“Another way in which it’s helpful for us as a hospital, we have our own questions we’d like to address because it helps us with treatment planning. If we want to query three year’s worth of medical records and see if there’s something that needs a clinical solution, we can do that now because we can enter the question we’re asking and extract the data.”
So what particular questions might a psych hospital be interested in, now that it can query its EHR data more easily? Much of it is a work in progress and is being structured to comply with CMS and Joint Commission regulations, but Dr. Ackerman offered one likely example.
“It’s our impression that in women who are admitted with a substance abuse problem, a history of early sexual abuse is very common,” he said. “We have one program to treat that but we might want to restructure it. We’d like to know how often that occurs. And now we can query three years of patient records.”
The QPID platform was developed at Massachusetts General Hospital and later spread to Partners HealthCare system, including to Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Faulkner and Newton-Wellesley. Usage has grown from 4,000 to 7,000 active users over the past year, supporting 3 million clinical encounters, the company said.
Investors include Cardinal Partners, Matrix Partners, Massachusetts General Physicians Organization, New Leaf Venture Partners, and Partners Innovation Fund.
It’s led by CEO Mike Doyle, and earlier this year raised a Series B round of $12.3 million. Initially, QPID focused on surgery risk assessment, but it has since grown to include EHR augmentation software and customized apps for hospitals that use the program.
