Innovations: PatientPing helps ACOs track patient care

Now more than ever, providers are eager to know when and where their patients get care from someone else.

Providers that are part of accountable care organizations and other emerging payment structures, for example, have a financial incentive to manage the care of a specific population of patients. Under most of those arrangements, however, the patients are free to seek care wherever they choose. And Medicare now penalizes hospitals when too many patients are hospitalized again within weeks of discharge.

But how can a provider even know a patient gets care from an outside system or clinician, let alone manage that patient's care without complete information? It's a problem that has dogged Medicare's efforts to retool the fee-for-service payment system widely blamed for high costs and poor health outcomes.

Boston-based PatientPing has found a unique way to connect providers across the country instantly. Co-founded in 2013 by former CMS Innovation Center strategist Jay Desai, PatientPing informs providers when their patient is admitted to an unaffiliated facility with real-time notifications, or pings.

The notifications are a simplified, web-based version of an electronic health record that identifies the facility and the physician treating the patient. With that information, providers can connect with each other to discuss appropriate treatment options for the patient and coordinate continuum-of-care strategies. Providers connect via phone, email or fax.

For now, providers get the pings when they log on to the company's web application. Push notifications for smartphones and tablets are in the works.

The technology relies on feeds of admission, discharge and transfer data commonly exchanged among healthcare IT systems. PatientPing's partners provide the company with a list of their patients and the networks they use. PatientPing takes that information and connects it to those facilities' feeds. PatientPing then filters through both the list of patients and the registration system looking for matches. When a match is identified, the providers are notified.

The solution is primarily aimed at Medicare patients—especially ones with multiple chronic conditions, because they get care from several doctors, Desai said. “When you're older, you can have many providers serving you, and by being able to share lightweight information, you can avoid duplicate procedures and poor follow-up care.”

For PatientPing to be most useful, it should be connected to at least 80% of the providers in a given region, Desai said, because providers can only receive a notification from a facility that PatientPing is connected to. For this reason, the company seeks out large, prominent healthcare systems and ACOs as partners.

After spending two years at the CMS Innovation Center trying to help ACOs connect with patients that frequently wander to outside providers for care, Desai left to launch PatientPing. The problem couldn't be solved with federal data, he concluded, and he bet there was an opportunity to build a company that could overcome that hurdle and was also easy to use.

PatientPing's funders include Google Ventures, First Round Capital, SV Angel and F-Prime Capital Partners. It has customers in six states, including heavy hitters such as Detroit-based Henry Ford Health System, and has what Desai considers “broad coverage” in each of those states.

The newest partner—since February 2015—is UMass Memorial Health Care. The four-hospital system, based in Worcester, Mass., participates in a Medicare ACO that includes six hospitals, 1,400 clinicians and 40,000 patients. PatientPing provided an easy way to monitor complex patients, said Christine Cernak, the system's senior director of population healthcare delivery and innovation.

The full implementation went live in June after more than a year of work connecting the UMass Memorial registration data with PatientPing. Since July, the system has generated more than 8,042 pings for 4,235 patients in 363 organizations. The software is used mostly by UMass nurses and social workers to track the care of patients with complex needs.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Cernak said the system has found the solution to be affordable.

UMass enlisted skilled-nursing facilities to share their registration data for PatientPing, and the relationships allow the systems' providers to stay up-to-date on patients' progress and any changes to their condition. It also allows the providers at skilled-nursing facilities to ask questions of their patients' primary-care providers.

“It truly becomes a community that eliminates the silos of care that exist in healthcare,” Cernak said. “I've been a nurse since 1985, and from my perspective, this is the first great hope that I've seen in taking down those walls.”