Kentucky Hospitals Partner on New Information System to Deliver Faster, More Effective Emergency Care

LOUISVILLE, Ky.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- A substantial grant from the Anthem Foundation has equipped physicians treating patients in emergency departments (EDs) across the state with new, state-of-the-art software to help make faster, more informed treatment decisions. The software, called EDie, was developed by Salt Lake City-based Collective Medical Technologies and is being provided at no cost to hospitals across the commonwealth by the Kentucky Hospital Association (KHA) thanks to the $250,000 grant.

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The partnership enables KHA member hospitals’ access to the Collective Medical network and EDie solution, a real-time, risk-adjusted event notification and care collaboration platform. This helps KHA members identify and support high-risk patients in need and facilitates collaboration of providers across care settings. As a result, the partnership aims to reduce avoidable readmissions, further enable statewide efforts to address the opioid epidemic, and better manage complex patients who frequently seek care in EDs.

Ten Kentucky hospitals have already adopted the technology with 28 additional facilities in the process of onboarding the software. These facilities will not only have access to data provided by each other, but also to data from hospitals in other states as well as substance use disorder facilities, skilled nursing facilities and specialty clinics across the country.

“Information is a powerful tool in medicine, especially emergency medicine when life and death decisions must be made quickly,” said Harold C. Warman, president of Highlands Regional Medical Center in Prestonsburg, the first hospital in Kentucky to go live with the EDie software. “EDie instantly consolidates information from multiple sources that would otherwise take hours to obtain, and lets emergency physicians make faster, more informed clinical decisions.”

“One particularly powerful application of this technology is in fighting Kentucky’s opioid epidemic,” explained KHA President Nancy Galvagni. “Emergency room hopping is a serious obstacle in helping people suffering from addiction and this software can tell a treating physician if the patient has a history of ER visits for pain treatment. EDie can be the difference between enabling addiction and treating it.”

“At Anthem, our mission is to simplify health care, and improve lives and communities. We value the relationships we have with providers, which in this instance is working to breakdown information silos and deliver better care,” said Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Kentucky President Kennan Wethington. “We’re incredibly proud of this innovative partnership because it will put this technology in the hands of more physicians as more forward-thinking hospitals choose to participate.”

EDie collects data from thousands of hospitals, urgent cares, clinics and health plans. It then packages needed data for emergency situations and delivers critical information to the emergency physician in real time, the instant it’s needed. In one concise report, the ED team can see patient history, visit summaries, medical providers, security events, and even care recommendations like preferred language and drug allergies.

The Anthem Foundation awarded the Kentucky Hospital Association this $250,000 grant as part of the organization’s efforts to create a more collaborative and efficient health care system.

About the Kentucky Hospital Association: KHA was established in 1929. The Association represents hospitals, related health care organizations and integrated health care systems dedicated to sustaining and improving the health status of the citizens of Kentucky. The Association is headquartered in Louisville.

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.

About the Anthem Foundation: As the philanthropic arm of Anthem, Inc., the Anthem Foundation promotes the organization’s commitment to improving lives and communities. Through strategic partnerships and programs, we are addressing the social determinants that will help create a healthier generation of Americans.

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