Digital Transformation at the Speed of COVID-19

How HCA leveraged advanced analytics and digital technologies to reap substantial profits amidst unprecedented turmoil

Add bookmark

The COVID-19 crisis pushed the already fragile U.S. healthcare system to the brink. While ICU admission soared, the number of money-making elective procedures plummeted

However, while some hospitals and healthcare providers struggled to stay afloat, others, such as HCA Healthcare actually grew revenue despite treating less patients overall. Though HCA’s ability to successfully navigate and drive profits during the pandemic was due to a number of factors (see here and here), today we’re going to take a look at the role digital technology may have played and how HCA is continuing to use cutting-edge technology as a competitive differentiator post-pandemic. 

 

The Move to Virtual Health

Heading into the COVID-19 pandemic, HCA had not yet fully embraced telehealth services beyond a diagnostic and clinical support service line. However, as the pandemic unfolded, that quickly changed. In fact, they developed a new term at HCA, “COVID speed,” to reflect the urgency at which these solutions needed to be developed. 

In just about a week a week “we went from providers performing fewer than 100 telehealth visits on a weekly basis across all of PSG to performing close to one million telehealth visits at the close of 2020. In fact, one morning in April 2020, we completed approximately 5,000 telehealth visits — that one morning surpassed the telehealth visits we completed throughout 2019,” Ryan Dorr, chief information officer (CIO) of Physician Services Group (PSG) shared on the HCA company blog. 

However, that wasn’t all.  As HCA’s Vice President of Digital Strategy and Development, Kelly Nye, explained in a recent interview, “now we have virtual access points across 6,000 care settings. We also set up chatbot functionality on our websites to let people get quick answers about COVID and other healthcare concerns so we’re maximizing our time spent on the phone while building confidence and comfort in getting them the right level of information versus using Dr. Google.” 

 

Data-Driven Patient Care

One of HCA’s early successes with advanced analytics was SPOT - an AI-powered sepsis detection tool. Using traditional, manual methods, by the time a patient is diagnosed with sepsis, it’s often too late to do much for them. In fact, Sepsis is responsible for 270,000 deaths per year in the United States alone.

Built on the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Ansible Tower, SPOT collects and analyzes vast amounts of clinical data (i.e. patient location, vital signs, pharmacy and laboratory data) to detect early signs of sepsis. On average, the tool can detect signs of sepsis 20 hours earlier than traditional methods, which, for a fast moving illness like sepsis, means thousands of lives can be saved per year

Following in the footsteps of SPOT, HCA’s data scientists developed NATE, (Next-gen Analytics for Treatment and Efficiency), an analytics tools that uses data visualizations to provide clinicians and facility operators visibility into what’s happening in the facility now and what’s likely to happen in the future so they can plan accordingly. 

During the pandemic, 2 COVID specific overlays were implemented:

  • coroNATE: Organized intelligence around COVID-19 patients for every bed in the HCA Healthcare system, which helped us move clinical resources where they were needed most.
  • C-ARDS (COVID ARDS): Decision support for clinicians regarding the appropriate clinical protocol for mechanically ventilated patients, specifically COVID-19 patients. C-ARDS gave care team members such as respiratory therapists, intensivists, and nurses the ability to monitor closely key data points for COVID-19 patients, which resulted in decreasing their length of stay and helping to increase survival for COVID-19 in our facilities by 28%.

 

Partnering with Google to Advanced Data Analytics and AI

In May of 2021, HCA and Google announced they would be teaming up to develop a "secure and dynamic data analytics platform" and data-enhance workflow tools that will enable clinicians to respond to patient needs in real-time. In other words, Google will help HCA mine the data generated from its 32 million annual patient encounters to pinpoint areas where clinical care can be improved.

In an interview with the WSJ, Dr. Jonathan Perlin, chief medical officer of HCA described what they are seeking to build as “a central nervous system to help interpret” real-time patient data. He also mentioned they planned to develop algorithms that “would help improve operations by, for example, automating how hospital units track inventory of critical supplies.”

The partnership will utilize Google Cloud’s healthcare data offerings such as Google Cloud Healthcare API and BigQuery, a planetary-scale database that provides full support for HL7v2 and FHIRv4 data standards in addition to HIPAA compliance. While Google will require consent from HCA to access data when needed, the tech giant can develop analytical tools without patient records and allow HCA to test the models independently.






RECOMMENDED