Health IT

Nonprofit OCHIN launches aggregation system to compete with the likes of Salesforce, SAP

Acuere is designed for both clinical decision support at the point of care and for population health management.

Acuere - Benchmarking

The latest entrant in the crowded field of healthcare data aggregation and analytics is an uncommon one: a nonprofit.

Last week, OCHIN, a health IT and research organization based in Portland, Oregon, released a data aggregation system called Acuere. It’s designed for both clinical decision support at the point of care and for population health management

“Point-of-care tools supplement existing decision support available within the EHR, panel management tools make population health managers jobs easier, statistical analysis tools for quality improvement teams and risk analysis and benchmarking tools are used by management and leadership,” Abby Sears, CEO of OCHIN said in response to emailed questions.

Acuere, in a sense, is competing with the likes of Validic, IBM Watson Health, Zynx Health, VisualDx, healthcare newcomers SalesforceSAP and, to a lesser extent, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong’s NantHealth.

“Acuere enables users to see a complete patient record by bringing together a variety of information,” Sears explained. It draws from multiple electronic health records — including dental records — and billing systems, then adds an analytics layer. EHR vendors OCHIN has connected with include Epic Systems, GE Healthcare, Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, Greenway Health and athenahealth.

“The information we aggregate not only includes claims and clinical data, but also information about a patient’s environment that can have a significant impact on a patient’s health outcome. Our algorithms are constantly running in the background to ensure that data is accurately matched in real-time,” she added.

Results from pilot users have been impressive. Neighborhood Family Practice in Cleveland reported a 77 percent rate of blood pressure control thanks to Acuere, according to data supplied by OCHIN.

“Being able to share the data at the provider, site and organization level creates an environment of healthy competition resulting in better documentation practices and sharing of ideas to improve performance,” said Marianella Napolitano, the practice’s vice president of performance improvement, said in an OCHIN press release.

Sears said that Acuere is suitable for researchers as well as clinicians. “Over the years, with the help of Acuere, OCHIN has built one of the nation’s foremost community laboratory for health outcomes, policy, and primary care research on vulnerable and underserved populations,” she said.

Images: OCHIN, Bigstock

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