Orange County Business Journal | Providers Look to Creatively Revolutionize Care

Reton, Wash.-based Providence St. Joseph Health’s California arm, St. Joseph Health, has its own take on technology, and its Southern California division, St. Joseph Hoag Health, will gradually incorporate the technologies that St. Joseph Health implements.

“If you look at St. Joseph [Health] within the acute or ambulatory space, we are actively providing care to patients, but if you look at technology in general, [electronic health records] has only been out since the mid-1990s,” said Michael Marino, who heads information services operations and clinical systems at St. Joseph Health.

Three areas of focus are sensor technology, electronic health records integration, and big data, and St. Joseph Health collaborates with three companies that it owns minority stakes in: San Antonio, Texas-based Airstrip Technologies, which it partnered with in 2014; Anaheim-based medical technology company Hart Inc., which it added in 2015; and Jacksonville, Fla.-based data analytics firm Clearsense LLC, which came on last year.

AirStrip’s platform makes disparate systems, data and devices interoperable. St. Joseph Health is adopting and implementing the company’s patient monitoring technology, which allows physicians and nurses to use smartphones to access critical clinical information, including live and historical waveform data previously accessible only at bedside, all while protecting the patient’s privacy.

Marino said St. Joseph Health is using the technology to provide obstetricians with real-time health data via smartphones and plans to use it to prevent heart attacks.

St. Joseph Health also is working with Hart’s namesake app designed to allow healthcare providers and patients better real-time access to medical records, lab results, post-visit instructions, and pill reminders, as well as personal wellness data, including fitness progress. The company has added to its offerings on-site patient check-in system Kiosk, and Clarity, which manages doctor workflows.

Clearsense performs real-time data analytics on data stored in disparate places, such as electronic medical records systems, labs, outpatient centers and insurance companies.

“Data comes from multiple settings, hospitals, ambulatory, emergency room,” Marino said. “Data is huge, and not being able to see all those data in real time, in a clear, organized [way], can cause inefficiency in care, repetitive care.”

St. Joseph Health is affiliated with healthcare incubator the Innovation Institute, which Marino described as a venture that takes ideas from inside and outside of the industry to develop for commercialization. The institute is a for-profit, limited liability company owned by five nonprofit health systems, including CHOC Children’s.

Excerpt only from Orange County Business Journal article: Providers Look to Creatively Revolutionize Care – Labs, Investments Target Nontraditional Approaches by Sherry Hsieh, February 20, 2017