Article

ClairVia® Featured in July 2006 Issue of Healthcare IT News
ClairVia® outcomes-driven demand management software and a ClairVia customer (Rapid City Regional Hospital) are featured in the July 2006 issue of Healthcare IT News, a leading healthcare publication produced in partnership with HIMSS.

The article, "Analytics Called on to Predict Staffing Needs," reveals how ClairVia's patient-tracking technology and predictive analytics are helping healthcare organizations-such as Rapid City-improve patient care, throughput, and overall staffing effectiveness.

Below is an excerpt of the article. The entire article is posted at http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=5155

RAPID CITY, SD-At Rapid City Medical Center in South Dakota, new software is helping administrators more accurately predict patient needs, enabling the hospital to make better use of tight staffing resources.

The software, among the resource-management tools developed by AtStaff, in Durham, N.C., determines patient-specific demand via HL7 integration with electronic medical records and admissions, discharge and transfer systems.

Rapid City thus has been able to identify procedure-specific patterns, such as the post-op needs of cardiac-bypass patients.

"Patients coming in for their first bypass have become fairly routine cases," said Lois Ames, RN, Rapid City's administrative director of patient services. "However, those coming back for a second or third bypass are more likely to develop renal failure, and...create a much higher demand on nursing."

AtStaff executives say that with nursing shortages now commonplace, pattern-recognition technology-part of what they call outcomes-driven demand management-can lead to improvements in throughput, patient care and staff workloads. Moreover, they stress that predictive software goes beyond assigning a certain number of nurses to a hospital unit based on patient census.

"A census doesn't tell you that if a patient has a hip replacement, he's going to need [more extensive] care for the first six hours," said the founder and chief science officer Michael Warner.

As of early June, five healthcare systems of AtStaff's installed base of 140 are using the product: Rapid City, Rush-Copley Medical Center in Aurora, Ill.; MedStar Health in Columbia, Md.; Exempla Healthcare in Denver; and Blessing Hospital in Quincy, Ill.

"Twelve months ago, our ability to predict staffing two to 14 days in advance was based off historical analysis," said Beth Pickard, AtStaff president and CEO. "Once we implemented the pattern-recognition technology, that's when the ability to predict [resource needs] increased two-fold."