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What is the Pneumonia Analytics Accelerator?

The Pneumonia Analytics Accelerator supports a focused, data-driven approach to evaluation and care, helping to drive and sustain significant improvement in clinical and financial outcomes. Typical implementations focus on initial diagnosis and disposition, timing and selection of medical therapy, antimicrobial stewardship, and care transitions.

Organizations typically choose to focus on CAP for these reasons:

  • Incidence and mortality remain high. Pneumonia is the most common reason for hospital admissions for American adults (other than women giving birth). The U.S. mortality rate for pneumonia has improved very little since the introduction of penicillin more than 50 years ago.
  • Cost burden is high. Pneumonia is one of the ten most expensive inpatient conditions.
  • Costs and mortality are highly variable depending on site of care. Effective management of pneumonia begins with initial severity assessment, since the decision to admit the patient or treat as an outpatient affects costs. Site-of-care decisions should balance risks and costs based on the individual patient and pneumonia severity. Higher mortality may result if severely ill patients are not initially admitted to the ICU. On the other hand, hospitalization of lower-risk patients better treated in an outpatient setting can delay recovery and increase the risk of complications as well as costs of care.
  • Evidence-based pneumonia care improves outcomes and reduces costs. Adherence to evidence-based guidelines for CAP has been shown to reduce mortality, hospitalization rate and LOS, readmission rate, variability in site-of-care decisions, and overall costs of care. Despite this evidence, implementation and maintenance of best practices has been suboptimal.

Pneumonia Analytics Accelerator Benefits and Features

Access an at-a-glance, near real-time view of quality of care and its impact.

The application dashboard visualizes outcome and process metrics in an easy-to-consume, one-page summary.

Focus your team on what matters most.

Outcome metrics typically include mortality, LOS, readmissions, patient satisfaction, and cost-per-case. Typical process metrics include adherence to assessment standards (e.g., severity documented via CURB65 or other validated tool; chest X-ray); timing of initial empiric antibiotics; percentage of patients assigned to appropriate site of care, antibiotic stewardship, and percentage of patients receiving all elements of follow-up care within targeted timeframes.

Access actionable insight for every patient.

The application presents reports showing each patient’s severity and risk; these may inform appropriate interventions to prevent readmission.

Start faster with meaningful, scalable clinical definitions.

The cohorts, definitions, and process measures that come with the accelerator are clinically relevant, standard, and meaningful across domains, ready for customization or adoption in your organization.

Do more than monitor: understand.

Detailed analytics of each bundle provide dynamic data exploration, real-time filtering, and drill-down to patient-level detail. The application also provides export or print capability for patient list, metric performance, etc. so you can share and follow up.

Pneumonia Analytics Accelerator Use Case

Referencing the Pneumonia application, a CMO notes that readmissions for pneumonia patients are increasing. What are the drivers of this trend? Working with Pulmonology leaders, he uses the application to identify improvement opportunities in both their early assessment (use of severity scoring) and disposition—as well as in their follow-up care. After implementing reinforcing education and communication with providers, the team uses the accelerator to track severity documentation and appropriateness of site of care. They also design and implement a team-based care-transition model and use the application to monitor its adoption and the impact on care. After 9 months, the team is able to associate reduced practice variation with clear improvement in outcomes: lower readmissions and higher patient satisfaction—as well as improvement in other aspects of standardized best practice, such as appropriate use of chest X-rays and optimized antimicrobial therapy.