By Jonathan Shoemaker, Chief Executive Officer, ABOUT Healthcare
Hospitals and health systems operating at capacity are turning away patients even as they struggle to meet revenue and profitability goals. Inefficient patient flow management reduces revenue opportunities, produces care delays, and creates unnecessary costs. Our mission is to help hospitals and health systems improve the movement of patients through their acute care journey through AI-enabled care orchestration.
As part of our product development and business strategy, ABOUT Healthcare acquired Edgility, an AI and patient progression company that monitors and manages hospital actions and health systems operations in real time, in April 2024. This acquisition augmented ABOUT’s technology with AI-driven decision support and actionable insights into patient progression throughout the hospital stay.
The response from our current and prospective customers to our combined solution has been overwhelming. This is no surprise because the combined ABOUT/Edgility platform empowers hospitals and health systems to forecast and predict discharge goals sooner—even upon admission. Anybody involved in care orchestration recognizes how critical such capabilities would be to managing patient flow and capacity challenges.
In a KLAS Research report published in May 2024, one customer of the Edgility Platform explained: “We use the Edgility Platform to extract data from our EMR to assist with patient movement, capacity, and demand. My staff in patient throughput uses the system to determine which patients need admission, which patients need discharge, and how we make decisions to move patients through our organization in a timely manner.”
KLAS Research noted that all customers interviewed “are very satisfied with the Edgility Platform and would buy the solution again,” specifically citing the solution’s ease of use as well as Edgility’s customer support and integration and data expertise. All customers reported greater capacity management efficiency, decreased length of stay, and faster throughput.
Not an EHR
Our platform is used across the acute patient journey, from admission through the inpatient stay as well as post-acute referral management to post-acute and home-care settings. By removing friction points and natural delays at each step of the patient journey, ABOUT helps hospitals and health systems to dramatically improve care orchestration.
One common misconception we encounter in the market is that ABOUT is an EHR. We are not, nor are we trying to be an EMR. What we bring is the ability to manage what’s happening at scale, and then layer intelligence into it to get the right outcomes. We draw data from EMRs and fill in the gaps where EMRs are not effective in decision making.
To provide safe care to a patient, you need an EMR. What ABOUT offers is a way for hospitals and health systems to have visibility into how they are operating their facilities or organizations and to ensure they are getting the outcomes they want at scale. That’s a different function to what an EMR does.
Embracing innovation
We work with health systems that are ready to be innovative. We’re looking for innovators to lead healthcare into a future of better outcomes and lower costs. And for us the path to innovation is shifting ABOUT from a process-driven to an intelligence company. Applying AI to challenges around length of stay, care continuity, and bed availability allows ABOUT customers drastically improve care coordination.
Those, however, are immediate problems. Hospitals and health systems face longer-term considerations: How do they understand their business over time? What does it take to run a good day? Do they know what’s going to happen tomorrow and the day after? How are they creating more capacity for patients? Over time, how will they address margin issues? What are their plans to manage a shrinking workforce and care for an aging population with an increased number of patients on government reimbursement programs?
ABOUT offers workflow applications and an AI analytics platform that give hospitals and health systems a unique data set and vision into their health system operation. Our acquisition of Edgility has augmented our care orchestration technology with new capabilities that create a next-generation system-wide patient flow model from admission to discharge. Delivering this “connective tissue” throughout the patient journey is helping healthcare organizations make better-informed decisions about patient progression through predictive and prescriptive analytics.
The ABOUT platform further enables health systems to realize command center strategies and connect and improve the operational anchors of transfers, admit management, patient flow, daily huddles, discharges, hospital-at-home, and referral management to post-acute and behavioral health settings of care. Our platform helps improve discharge and patient velocity, supports operational and financial goals, and delivers optimal patient outcomes. It is the only end-to-end care orchestration platform in the market.
The road ahead
One of the major advantages of ABOUT’s technology approach is our speed to market and ability to align the technology to each health systems’ needs. This accelerates our ability to implement solutions and outcomes, which allows our customers to accelerate their speed to value.
As we continue to evolve our platform, we will focus on both the day-to-day orchestration and administrative challenges facing hospitals and health systems, as well as their long-term financial and strategic issues. We will continue to add the functionality that matters most for an operating system of an acute care organization while driving more intelligence back into the workflow apps and platform.
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About the Author
Jonathan Shoemaker joined ABOUT in 2023 as Chief Executive Officer, bringing more than 25 years of health system and information systems experience with a proven history of transforming and delivering initiatives and solutions that improve healthcare delivery, operations, and growth.
Before joining ABOUT, Jonathan most recently was senior vice president of operations and chief integration officer as well as a member of the senior executive team leading Allina Health’s Performance Transformation Office. Before his most recent role at Allina, Shoemaker spent six years as Allina Health’s chief information officer and chief improvement officer. Prior to Jonathan’s tenure at Allina, he held leadership positions at prominent IT & healthcare firms, including NorthPoint Health and Wellness Center, BORN Consulting, and Hennepin County Medical Center.