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Advanced data analytics may hold the power to help predict likely prescription drug abuse in patients, a needed breakthrough as an opioid epidemic sweeps the country.  The problem is "no longer just heroin and cocaine; it's prescription drugs,” said Jaya Tripathi, principal investigator at the MITRE Corp. “If you look at the trends, despite the overwhelming focus and funds, more needs to be done." [Poll: What topics will define HIMSS16?] Her team at MITRE researched public and private stakeholders and interviewed board members and law enforcement officials and others over the course of 18 months. The interviews revealed ways to carry out implementation with a broad approach. In a Wednesday morning session at HIMSS16, “Data Analytics Takes the Pain out of Pain Pill Management,” Tripathi plans to discuss advanced analytics and the ways it can predict drug abusers. She'll also talk about some Big Data challenges and how to overcome them. MITRE operates multiple, federally funded research and development centers and a robust research program. Tripathi's prescription drug project began three years ago, while she's been in the analytics field for a decade. [Also: 21 awesome photos from past HIMSS conferences] Tripathi said the study demonstrated provider challenges, especially in the emergency room, to differentiate the symptoms of similar patients, when prescribing medications. "They do a lot of subjective interpretation," Tripathi said. "There are vital disagreements on how to handle it." "I wanted to solve this problem and look at all current solutions, identify gaps and what we need," Tripathi added, saying a better predictive approach would provide the necessary empirical data. "Data is everything, but you can do better if you know the right techniques," Tripathi said. "If your data is poor, your models will only go so far." Tripathi noted that each pharmacy must report every controlled-drug prescription to the state, as much as once every 24 hours. Her project has found access to analytics data of this resource at the point-of-sale can make sure the drugs are making it into the right hands and in the right amount. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] "We had a lot of information, like drug interaction — so when you outline that you get a much bigger picture," Tripathi said.  "People have done a lot of work out there and sometimes one technique will inform the other. But it also needs to be usable." Tripathi’s session, “Data Analytics Takes the Pain out of Pain Management,” is scheduled for March 2, 2016 from 8:30 to 9:30 a.m. at the Sands Expo Convention Center Palazzo D. Twitter: @JessiefDavis This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

Healthcare organizations are recognizing that clinical decision support technology that integrates with electronic health records can be utilized to improve quality of care and better utilize staff and resources. Community Medical Centers, for instance, had already embarked on adoption of an EHRs system when in 2014 it added clinical decision support technology to develop an evidence-based approach to care. Such a system promised to help nurses and doctors save valuable time by integrating CDS tools into their care plan and, in turn, improving their communication with patients. [Poll: What topics will define HIMSS16?] “The goal was to enhance quality of care and efficiency,” said Lauren Garrick, Corporate Informatics Nurse and Plan of Care Coordinator at Community Medical Centers in Fresno, California. The hospital group selected ZynxCare, a plan of care solution from ZynxHealth, which provided templates to allow nurses and doctors to recommend and provide relevant services by providing access to medical research libraries, comprising hundreds of diagnoses and procedures. With this evidence-based information at their fingertips, the clinicians could  focus on their individual patients. The CDS tools also easily integrated with Community Medical Centers’ digital Epic EHR system. Garrick said a benefit for Community Medical Centers was the ability of the ZynxCare system to be customized according to the needs of the hospital group. “They have software you build and an integration process you use to integrate it into your system,” Garrick said. “You can pull up these templates for plan of care and support changes and create templates in Excel files, and our tech team can migrate the files into EHRs.” Garrick, along with Judi Binderman, VP and chief medical informatics officer for Community Medical Centers, will outline how CDS technology program was conceived, developed and implemented across the four hospitals in a presentation at HIMSS16.    [Also: 21 awesome photos from past HIMSS conferences] Their talk, “Taking Plans of Care from Clinician to Patient-Centric” will examine how Community Medical Centers replaced its homegrown, generic plans of care with the evidence-based, CDS system specific to the patient’s condition and adjustable to special requirements the patient may have. Garrick said that with the CDS program in place, nurses can now easily access information on generic conditions for patients while examining and communicating with the patient closely. “A nurse would have access to relevant information, and be able to instantly go through medical journals and web links for a patient,” she said. “For example, if they are advising someone about Sudden Infant Death prevention, a staff member can click on links and read research right at the patient’s bedside.” “Taking Plans of Care from Clinician to Patient-Centric,” is scheduled for Wednesday March 2, 2016 from 10-11 AM in the Sands Expo Convention Center Palazzo G. Twitter: @HealthITNews This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

The company will also tout a new data recovery partnership with Amazon Web Services, the CEO said.

More than 30 interviews with thought leaders will be broadcast over two days.

Israel-based artificial intelligence startup MedyMatch Technology has launched with an artificial intelligence product that it hopes will improve performance in healthcare through its real-time decision support tools. MedyMatch also announced earlier this month that former Philips Imaging Systems CEO Gene Saragnese joined the company as chairman and CEO. Company officials said they would soon open the company’s first U.S. office in Boston in order to provide support for the startup’s rapidly expanding list of clinical trial partners, machine and deep learning collaborations and product development. MedyMatch uses advanced cognitive analytics and artificial intelligence to provide real-time decision support tools that, together with standard emergency room imaging platforms, helps the radiologist or emergency room physician recognize what is often the hardest to see or most obscure conditions. Despite advancements in medical imaging technologies, the medical imaging misdiagnosis rate in the emergency room has remained unchanged for 30 years, executives point out, with misdiagnosis occurring in approximately 30 percent of cases. [Poll: What topics will define HIMSS16?] The American Heart Association and American Stroke Association estimate that by 2030, there will be approximately 3.4 million stroke victims annually in the United States, with a total cost of $240 billion. Moreover, 42 percent of that cost – about  $183 billion – is attributed to the annual direct medical and extended care expenses. MedyMatch officials say the startup can help reduce the cost because of its accuracy in the treatment window, which in turn can help lower the number of people with long-term chronic conditions. As Saragnese sees it, MedyMatch’s technology and artificial intelligence-based image classification will provide physicians with the deeper insights they need to make the right diagnosis and do so quickly. Before Philips Healthcare, Saragnese headed up the CT, molecular imaging and image processing divisions within GE Healthcare. Prior to that, he served as GE Healthcare’s chief technology officer and the general manager of GE's MRI business. Twitter: @HealthITNews This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

Massachusetts General Hospital and Cogito have partnered on a National Institute of Mental Health-funded project aimed at addressing depression and bipolar disorder. MGH is the largest hospital in the Bay State, and serves as the teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School. Cogito, a startup spinoff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, specializes in behavioral analytics. "We focus on automatically measuring behavior and understanding behavior," said Cogito CEO Joshua Feast. "We're interested in the way people move and react. On the healthcare front, Cogito technologies are aimed at helping organizations understand, manage and care for patients. [Also: Behavioral health data 'burdens EHRs'] In its work with MGH, Cogito will deploy Cogito's Companion app, designed to analyze voice patterns to detect emotions. When you look at depression or bipolar disorder, one of the key goals is to prevent people from relapsing, said Thilo Deckersbach, MD, who is leading the new study and is associate professor, Harvard Medical School. "One of the ways to do that," he said, "is to keep an eye on their mood. You have to make sure they pay attention to it to make sure it doesn't creep in because the sooner you can intervene, the better your chances are to prevent a recurrence of depression or to prevent a recurrence of mania. So, it's all about prevention." However, Deckersbach said that humans – with or without behavioral disorders –  are good at tracking at the beginning, but as time goes by, they forget. [Also: $1.3 million in EHR grants for behavioral health] "It's where Cogito and the Companion as a platform come into the game," he said. "If you can devise a method that a smartphone does the job for you, and you do not need to track your mood every day, then you have achieved something that is highly sensitive, highly reliable that you can detect your mood early and prevent depression or mania." MGH's MoodNetwork is a nationwide patient-powered system and a critical engine to help power the new research initiative, which is funded through a $1.8 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. Worldwide, about 350 million people suffer from depression, according to the World Health Organization, and bipolar disorder affects more than 5.7 million American adults. [Also: 11 essential quotes from notable HIMSS keynotes] The project, which is open to 1,000 MoodNetwork participants, will provide real-time mood feedback to patients based on daily audio diaries recorded via Cogito Companion, an application on patients' mobile devices. The initiative will track key behavioral indicators, such as physical isolation, social connectedness and fatigue – the major symptom groups for mood disorder. The intent is to create health data set aimed at improving the experiences of people with depression and bipolar disorder. "While many expect that physical disorders would solely account for disability, major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder are among the top causes globally," Andrew A. Nierenberg, MD, director of the Bipolar Research Program at MGH, and principal investigator of MoodNetwork, said in a statement. "The goal of this initiative is to understand symptom relapse over the lifecycle of these conditions and offer long-term care and support options for patients. With the yearly combined annual cost of depression and bipolar disorder at greater than $200 billion, we hope to bend the care and cost curve with the help of behavioral analytics synched to this patient population." Twitter: @HealthITNews

The development of standards through the lab will help ONC further develop interoperability standards, official says.

Medsphere Systems, maker of the OpenVista electronic health record, and MBS/Net have merged, adding physician practice services and proprietary applications to Medsphere’s existing healthcare IT tools and services for acute and inpatient behavioral health settings.  Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but officials said MBS/Net will retain its name and operate as a division of Medsphere.  Medsphere’s OpenVista EHR is derived from the VistA system developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Indian Health Service. [Also: Health Partners New England taps Medsphere for behavioral health] The addition of Cleveland-based MBS/Net expands Medsphere’s products and services to include an ambulatory physician suite of products that includes a physician practice management system, ambulatory EHR, document management system and a scheduling app. It also includes the company’s outsourced revenue cycle management and practice hardware management services, officials say. The Medsphere-MBS/Net merger follows the March 2015 merger of Medsphere and Phoenix Health Systems, which provides a range of healthcare IT services, including systems implementation, compliance project management and more. MBS/Net’s products and services coupled with Medsphere’s OpenVista platform will further interoperability between Medsphere’s hospital clients and their affiliated physician communities, Medsphere President and CEO Irv Lichtenwald said in a statement. "We’ve seen the benefits the practice management and revenue cycle solutions have created for MBS/Net clients, in some instances boosting individual practice revenue by more than 100 percent," he said. "The focus of MBS/Net solutions on physician practices and the recent addition of Phoenix Health Systems’ consulting and services enables Medsphere to meet the needs of providers across the spectrum of healthcare." Twitter: @HealthITNews

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