Collective Medical Helps Providers Collaborate on Care for High-Risk Infants

Every 15 minutes a baby is born with NAS. From 2004 to 2014, recorded NAS births increased fivefold—and these babies are more likely to have low birthweights and poor respiratory health. In some states, like Kentucky, the number of NAS cases increased nearly 200 percent from 2010 to 2016. In some Kentucky hospitals, up to 50 percent of children born are affected by NAS. These infants are twice as likely as uncomplicated term babies to be readmitted to the hospital within 30 days of discharge.

“Babies born with high-risk conditions, such as NAS, are terrifyingly vulnerable,” says Chris Klomp, CEO of Collective Medical. “Even merely identifying these individuals, as they present with complications in different healthcare settings, is particularly difficult because they are often discharged from a hospital after birth without customary identifying information such as a first name or social security number.”

Klomp continues, “This need carries moral imperative. After working with caregivers on the front lines--inspiring individuals who are doing everything in their power to care for these babies, including our partners at Highlands Regional Medical Center in Kentucky and the Kentucky Hospital Association—we understand the weight and importance of this situation. We feel genuinely humbled by, and grateful for, the opportunity to devote our resources to rolling out a technology-enabled approach that can meaningfully impact care decisions for these infants and enable them to live healthy lives.”

“The dramatic rise in NAS is a significant public health problem linked to the opioid epidemic. Thousands of babies are born each year with NAS,” says Nancy Galvagni, senior vice president of the Kentucky Hospital Association. “Collective will be instrumental for our member hospitals in improving the vital care coordination around these babies and their families.”

The Collective Platform is a real-time, risk-adjusted event notification and care collaboration tool fueled by user-generated insights from emergent, inpatient, post-acute, mental and behavioral, and ambulatory settings, as well as stakeholders in ACOs and health plans.

The Collective Network is currently implemented across 32 states and is proven to materially impact the opioid epidemic. For example, Collective serves as the technical backbone to Washington State’s groundbreaking “ER is for Emergencies” program. Since the inception of the project, Washington has seen a 24 percent reduction in opioid prescriptions coming out of the ED. Similarly, Mat-Su Regional Medical Center in Palmer, Alaska, utilizes the Collective Platform in combination with statewide prescribing guidelines. This combination resulted in a nearly 80 percent reduction in opioid scripts written between 2015 to 2018 and a 47 percent reduction in opioids given in the ED.

Collective is endorsed as a best practice for emergency medicine by the American College of Emergency Physicians and has been recognized by Inc. Magazine and by the MountainWest Capital Network as one of Utah’s fastest growing companies.

Learn more about Collective’s impact at www.collectivemedical.com.

ABOUT COLLECTIVE MEDICAL

Collective Medical empowers care teams to improve patient outcomes by closing the communication gaps that undermine patient care. With a nationwide network engaged with every national health plan in the country, hundreds of hospitals and health systems and tens of thousands of providers, Collective’s system-agnostic platform is trusted by care teams to identify at-risk and complex patients and facilitate actionable collaboration to make better care decisions and improve outcomes. Based in Salt Lake City, Collective is proven to streamline transitions of care, improve coordination across diverse care teams, and reduce medically unnecessary hospital admissions. Learn more at www.collectivemedical.com and Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

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