This article is sponsored by MatrixCare. In this Voices interview, Skilled Nursing News sits down with Ingrid Svensson, Chief Product Officer of MatrixCare, to learn how technology has helped the skilled nursing industry get control over the clinical aspects of COVID-19. She also discusses the new long-term care data cooperative partnership between MatrixCare, AHCA and Exponent, forged to help SNFs predict the management of future illnesses and the COVID vax.

Skilled Nursing News: Technology continues to evolve as the pandemic goes on and new variants emerge. When you look at technology use in the skilled nursing industry during 2021, what stands out to you?

Ingrid Svensson: First and foremost, I am amazed by the resilience of those working and serving patients in this sector despite the challenges they’ve encountered in the past 18 months. Right now, in skilled nursing facilities, the clinical issues have largely been dealt with. The financial issues continue to impact the industry, but the ability for these people to manage the disease is incredible.

Technology has played a big role in that. Early in the pandemic, MatrixCare quickly pivoted our R&D work to help thousands of skilled nursing organizations use machine learning-derived analytics embedded into our EHR to understand each resident’s risk for developing a COVID-19 infection, and how severe the infection may be.

We created a COVID-19 dashboard for our customers and gave it to them at no cost. Organizations use the information for assisting, cohorting their patients and relocating their patients for better isolation and management of the various aspects of COVID. We turned this into a COVID-19 severity risk dashboard, which continues to evolve today.

The dashboard analyzes data points that the CDC identified as COVID-19 comorbidities. As the CDC recommendations change, so does the dashboard. When the CDC adds new comorbidities and diagnosis codes, we integrate those data points into our algorithms to better predict COVID-19 infections among residents. Thousands of MatrixCare customers have been using this solution to help prevent infections and mitigate the spread of the disease.

MatrixCare recently launched Clinical Advanced Insights, the solution designed to predict fall risk for SNF residents. What are your top two or three MatrixCare products, partnerships, hirings or innovations of the year?

Svensson: That’s correct. We launched Clinical Advanced Insights last month at AHCA. It’s a product we’re incredibly excited about. We’ve built in analytics for tracking the health status of a resident in real time to alert the facility of a changing condition. The result is the ability to predict the chance of a fall and intervene in real time to reduce that risk.

According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, approximately half of the 1.6 million residents in U.S. nursing facilities fall annually. About a third of those will fall two or more times in a year. Many will face serious consequences.

Falls are incredibly costly, estimated at a cost of $50 billion per year to the health care system. Our Clinical Advanced Insights has the potential to reduce the overall cost of care and minimize these harmful consequences while helping providers to maximize staffing for more effective resource allocation.

The solution analyzes different and unique data elements, from demographics, vitals, progress notes and active diagnosis to change in condition and potential fall risk. We’ve integrated this into the workflow of the nursing staff through clear, easy-to-understand dashboards, proactive alerts and workflows.

The skilled nursing operator can see the status of every facility in their enterprise and drill down in real time to each floor wing and individual resident. At a glance, staff can see how patient conditions have shifted in the last half-hour. Think about that for a second. In the last half-hour, has the health status or the acuity of a resident changed?

This can be overnight or over the weekend. So many hospitalizations happen due to gaps in care over the weekend. This opportunity gets right at that and supports our customers who are struggling with staffing shortages.

We’ve also recently partnered with AHCA in a new effort to enable comprehensive tracking of COVID and future public health threats facing nursing facilities. I think this will be transformational.

With regards to predictive analytics, what does MatrixCare have on tap in 2022?

Svensson: As we look at 2022, EHRs have entered a new phase in their evolution from compliance to workflow tools, and that’s to being data assets. That’s where MatrixCare’s innovation is focused now: leveraging the data in our EHRs into predictive insights to solve more of our customers’ biggest challenges.

It’s much better than a director of nursing getting a report that says, “Last month, we had seven falls and nine wounds developed in our facility.” That’s where our focus is: tracking the health status of residents and predicting changes that are going to lead to these adverse conditions. It allows caregivers to focus on preventative, proactive care.

We see future applications of machine learning and predictive analytics outside of the clinical space as well, moving into optimizing the operational and financial aspects of the business. Our goal for predictive analytics and our machine learning capabilities is to help providers take proactive, real-time action to meaningfully improve the management of clinical risk, drive labor efficiencies and increase profitability.

At AHCA this year, the industry learned about a new long-term care data cooperative partnership between MatrixCare, AHCA and Exponent to share EHR data, helping SNFs predict management of future illnesses and the COVID vax. What is MatrixCare’s role in the partnership, and what are you most excited about?

Svensson: AHCA’s long-term care data cooperative is focused on collecting EHR data from participating facilities and tracking health-related conditions. The data collected will support public health reporting, identify research opportunities for NIH and assist providers with health care operations, treatments and care practices. It’s aspirational and incredibly visionary by AHCA. We’re thrilled to be part of it.

AHCA’s going to work with MatrixCare, Exponent and likely other partners to collect data and submit reports to the CDC and other agencies, including the FDA. Data may be provided to the CDC on updates on the influenza spread: where, what residents, what locations or geographies, and what residence.

There also may be research reports on patients who received COVID-19 vaccines from different sources — for example, patients who started with the J&J and switched to an mRNA vaccine and the different combinations there. Making patient data available for research is critical, in part because it will impact trust in our industry and in individual nursing homes.

The health care-at-home movement continues to build, with SNF-at-Home growing more common. What is the most important consideration SNF operators must take as they consider moving into this space?

Svensson: We’ve definitely seen an increased desire from patients to age in place. When we think of aging in place, we think of aging at home. We want to enable seniors to stay in their current care setting for as long as possible.

We’ve also seen a SNF-at-Home movement take shape. SNF operators should understand that SNF-at-Home is not a plug-and-play operation. There are many intricacies to providing home-based care. We, MatrixCare, have home health, hospice and home care solutions. We have a unique understanding of the challenges of providing home-based care.

While high-quality care and outcomes remain the top priorities in all of these care settings, the approach may be quite different. Because of our experience across these care settings, we also have an intimate understanding of the different technology considerations for providing care in the home.

How do you efficiently deliver that level of one-on-one care in a home? We have worked with our SNF customers and have heard the economics of SNF-at-Home are still pretty uncertain. Overall, the concept of SNF-at-Home is exciting. It brings a higher level of nursing care into the home, provides more options to higher-acuity patients and creates an opportunity for SNFs and home health agencies to collaborate, which I think is great.

For SNFs that have started their SNF-at-Home journey, what is their top technology need for succeeding in this space?

Svensson: It’s not much different than what the facility-based organizations have: interoperability. Organizations looking to expand into the home must be able to leverage technologies to support enhanced interoperability. This allows them to pass meds, do documentation and send other important information back and forth in real time, thus reducing the administrative burden and ensuring providers across care settings can send and receive information with confidence.

There’s higher staff turnover across the industry on the home health agency side as well. As such, strong training and onboarding technology will continue to grow in importance and popularity among out-of-hospital care providers. It’s also important for organizations shifting to SNF-at-Home models to work with a technology provider that has an understanding of the unique challenges of providing technology to caregivers who are going into someone’s home on their own.

This is different from what exists in a facility. We believe that competency and the experience of delivering purpose-built solutions for a number of post-acute care settings is critical. I think MatrixCare is going to be a key leader in the SNF-at-Home movement.

Looking beyond MatrixCare at the industry as a whole, what forthcoming health care innovations are you most excited to see?

Svensson: I touched on predictive analytics earlier. As you can tell, I’m excited about the application of this technology in skilled nursing. The ability to track changes in the health status of a resident that may lead to adverse clinical conditions or predict new infections in order to control the spread of new outbreaks is particularly intriguing. Given where we’ve been in the past 18 months, it couldn’t be more important.

I’m also excited about the prospect of what we refer to as the three stages of the EHR and the long-term care evolution. As we start to leverage data, we’re turning this into a smart EHR or smart electronic health record with embedded predictive analytics to optimize care operations and profitability in the businesses at large. In this era, we have millions upon millions of data points, not just within the nursing facility, but with the payer and social determinants from the hospital.

Lastly, I’m excited about using an innovative interface and intuitive user experience to help solve the labor challenge. We can help SNFs leverage data and the smart EHR to make caregivers less reactive and more proactive — even understanding which caregivers may be at risk of resigning if we as an industry can get people through the 90-day mark.

Coming into this year, no one knew fully what to expect in the skilled nursing industry. What has been the biggest surprise this year and what impact do you think that surprise will have on the industry in 2022?

Svensson: I think the biggest surprise is that we’re still fighting this global pandemic, which continues to impact skilled nursing homes. They’ve gotten many of the clinical impacts under control but we’re still fighting to build back census, the brand and the trust in our industry. It’s going to take perhaps another 12 to 15 months to regain that trust in order to get back to pre-pandemic census levels.

I’m surprised at how the disease has persisted and, looking back, the impact it’s had on our industry. Again, we’ve been able to manage these clinical aspects. Technology has played a huge role in that. I think the industry has begun to see the opportunity that technology can play to provide preventative care to residents. The nursing home industry has historically been an under investor in technology as a percent of revenue relative to other industries.

In macroeconomics, there’s a concept of the production-possibility frontier. It’s how national governments make trade-offs or think about trade-offs between defense spending and spending on societal programs. I think the same thing is occurring and will occur in our industry regarding the share of spend on technology versus the share of spend on labor. It’s never going to be more than labor, but we have to rebalance it.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

MatrixCare is the only EHR provider to focus on the entire senior care continuum. To learn more about how MatrixCare can help your organization, visit MatrixCare.com.

The Voices Series is a sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends, topics and more shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For more information on Voices, please contact [email protected].