*Oakkar Oakkar, Javed Mostafa
Keona Health, Inc.
Demo-Interactive Presentation – Business Track
Sunday, Sept 30, 2012: 3:10 PM – 3:25 PM – Demo Pavilion
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*Presenting Speaker
Background
80% of internet users look for health information online. Unfortunately, websites and symptom checkers, like WebMD, cannot access or track medical history and cannot connect patients to their healthcare providers. Keona Health offers the revolutionary capability for patients to get recommendations from nurses online. Keona Health can access and utilize patient history and leverage the time and knowledge of patients to make the nurse’s job more efficient. Doctors and nurses are under pressure to provide higher quality services to more patients with fewer resources. And since healthcare reform continues to require new quality measures this will only increase.
The goals of this study were to:
- Measure cost and time savings to providers offering online triage to their patients.
- Demonstrate a two step process where patients first self-report their own complaint and history online, and then the nurse calls the patients back.
- Evaluate the quality of data from patients’ self-reported history and the ability for a Clinical Decision Support (CDS) system to give instant feedback for emergent conditions and prioritize urgent cases for nurse review.
Methods
A randomized control trial is wrapping up at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Over 28,000 students are offered online access to campus health services. Half of the students who click our link are randomly directed to traditional access means. The other half answer an intelligent, branching list of questions related to their primary complaint. The concordance of the CDS recommendation with the nurse recommendations are measured for patients triaged online.
Progress of Research
The stated success criteria were: 1) Improved or no statistical significant difference in safety of Online Triage compared to telephone triage, and 2) Demonstrated cost savings of >= 5%. Our data to date indicates a nearly 50% decrease in nurse phone time for cases that go through our system! We expect to report on additional data at the conference.
Demo
Conference participants will be able to demo our system for facilitating the nurse-patient interaction online. The CDS guided interview and time-saving features examined in the study will be emphasized. The demonstration will consist of our patient-facing web user interface where the patient can enter their “complaints” and a nurse-facing web-based user interface where they see the data and functions we make available to the nurse. Some of the features demonstrated will be: secure communication, CDS safety checks, EHR integration, semi-automated patient education, and automated documentation. The most novel function is likely the CDS-guided patient intake that intelligently gathers patient data online and presents it to the nurse. Because the data are collected in a structured way, we are able to add intelligent features that are unavailable elsewhere, including additional safety checks for both patient and nurse, automated documentation, and tailored patient education. We will have handouts at the conference. Viewers will also be able to go onto our website, www.keonahealth.com, for further information.
