Care collaboration between providers on the continuum remains a top priority for skilled nursing facilities and other providers, especially as new payment models such as bundled payments require operators to work together.
One Utah-based firm sees potential in capturing emergency-room data that follows a patient outside the hospital — and investors have given the idea a $47.5 million vote of confidence.
The Salt Lake City, Utah-based Collective Medical, which provides care collaboration technology, raised $47.5 million in a round of Series A funding, with the investment led by Kleiner Perkins.
The company has a presence in more than 500 hospitals and more than 1,000 other points of care, with a presence in 13 states ranging from Alaska to West Virginia, with plans to roll out in 10 additional states by next year. Two to three additional states are expected to be added near the end of the year.
Of those states, 100% of Oregon and Washington hospitals provide data into CM’s system, according to Dr. Ben Zaniello, chief medical officer and vice president of product at Collective Medical.
CM works with a variety of providers, including emergency departments, skilled nursing facilities, and mental and behavioral health organizations. The company’s EDIE Web Application for emergency departments (EDs) curates data from every ED visited by a patient, according to Collective Medical’s website. The PreManage tool allows providers and insurance companies to view data on specific patients that follows them through the care continuum, including a clinical visit history, the website indicates.
“Medical uncertainty is driving a lot of the cost, waste and risk in health care,” Zaniello told Skilled Nursing News. “What our software does is [reduce] medical uncertainty by spreading actionable medical specific data.”
On Point
The goal is not just to collect information, but to provide the information needed for each different patient encounter at any point of care.
“There are many terrific sources of information — patient-specific, valuable information,” Zaniello said. “Our goal is to bring that all into one place, and that place should be where the patient is.”
For skilled nursing facilities, providing information during transitions of care is essential.
“One of the challenges is that within the skilled nursing facilities, they all use different [systems] — and some of them are not even using electronic medical records, and others are using multiple different kinds of electronic medical records,” Audrey Kelly, an independent consultant whose work with SNFs includes teaching facilities about care coordination and care transitions, told SNN.
The chasm between a hospital and a SNF’s EMRs is where technology comes in handy, according to Kelly.
“In that gap, there’s such a high risk of things going bad or just dropping any opportunity to support any continuity of care,” she said. “You can have data in that gap.”
In the case of a patient arriving at a SNF, CM will “push” the data on the hospital stay, prescription drug monitoring, and other metrics — such as information from a geriatric care provider — into the workflow of the SNF. This approach is driven by the needs of providers, particularly those in the emergency room, but CM can adjust for the various care providers.
“They don’t have time to be spelunking to look up all these data sources, so what we do is we go to where they live,” Zaniello explained. “We embed alerts in the user workflow, so for a skilled nursing facility, that would be in their [electronic medical record].”
Adding SNFs
Collective Medical has only been working with SNFs for two of its eight years, and its volume in that area is relatively small, Zaniello said.
“So I think we’ll be focusing on more integration — for example, making it easier for SNFs to participate in our health network,” he explained.
The company is also actively working with SNF technology vendors, such as PointClickCare.
“We’re in 100% of hospitals in many states; we’d like to be in 100% of skilled nursing facilities in many states because they’re such a critical part of that care continuum,” Zaniello said. “Optimizing their transitions of care will ultimately be better for the patient and for the caregivers of the patients.”
Written by Maggie Flynn
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