Patient Engagement

San Francisco start-up Tiatros, a doctor-driven, patient-centered social network, has joined the IBM Watson Ecosystem, the companies announced March 2 at HIMSS16. Tiatros was designed to allow physicians, with the consent of patients, to create a social network around the patient, including all doctors involved in their treatment and their family members. The first user of the platform was the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco. UCSF hopes to leverage Watson to analyze personality insights for more personalized treatment, officials say. [Also: See photos from Day 3 of HIMSS16] Currently, UCSF is using Tiatros to address the behavioral health needs of young veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq to keep all parties connected to the patient – whether family or multiple providers – in the loop. "The real measure of how a patient is doing is the story they tell, not the boxes they check; that tells part of the story, not the whole story," said Kim Norman, MD, psychiatry professor, UCSF. "I think the online treasure trove of data in clinical practice is in the unstructured data and the story it tells. "I feel Watson gives you the tool to really analyze and extract that data, patient by patient and aggregate that data to really understand populations," he added. Data is entered in increments of 2,000 words through an essay format or using the most recent text messages from a patient. With the addition of Watson, the platform can analyze the information to accurately assess the personality traits, human values and needs of a patient. For veterans, this means Watson can determine patients with pre-imposed personality traits to be the most resilient in preventing posttraumatic stress disorders and those more likely to respond to an intervention, Norman said. Furthermore, interventions can be modified to match the traits. Additionally, Watson analytics can provide themes and allow providers to measure how patients are doing based on their stories. 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.

LAS VEGAS – TigerText Inc., a secure healthcare communications technology vendor, has announced at HIMSS16 partnerships with Salesforce and Box to launch care collaboration systems. The partnerships will enable streamlined communication across the continuum of care to decrease care delivery costs while improving outcomes, said TigerText, which is highlighting the new partnerships at its HIMSS16 exhibit hall booth (#425). TigerText is using its developer platform, dubbed TigerConnect, to enable the partnership integrations; the vendor also is expanding the suite of tools in Tiger Connect to inspire more healthcare developers to boost patient-centric care, the vendor said. “Healthcare is hungry for better communication tools that are embedded into existing workflows,” said Itamar Kandel, president of TigerText. “With TigerConnect, our partners can harness the power of secure messaging to address this need without the hassle, cost and delay of building it themselves.” [Also: See photos from Day 3 of HIMSS16] Salesforce Health Cloud customers soon will be able to embed the TigerText messaging service in their Health Cloud portals, enabling clinical staff to conduct HIPAA-compliant conversations for streamlined care coordination. And through a new integration with Box’s DICOM viewer, both TigerText and Box hospital users can share and collaborate on DICOM images via the TigerText mobile interface. On another front, in an effort to support innovative companies, TigerText has launched TigerConnect for Startups. The launch partners for this new initiative include Medisafe, WinguMD and AccountedCare. With more than 2.6 million users, Medisafe’s cloud-synced mHealth platform helps patients stay on top of their medications. Medisafe is collaborating with TigerConnect to research doctor utilization of patient-generated data to inform adherence, the vendors said. Also, working with TigerConnect, WinguMD, an enterprise mobile photography system, enables secure collaboration on visual findings for an entire care team. And AccountedCare’s PoC software, a mobile platform for value-based care providers, uses TigerConnect to deliver real-time notifications, tracking and reporting across the post-acute care continuum to help manage costs and quality for accountable care organizations. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT 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.

West Healthcare has launched at HIMSS16 a communication system designed to automate patient engagement and extend investments in population health

Report to be published on Thursday at HIMSS16 also shows 85 percent of doctors said that using wearables can help patients become more involved.

David Weinstock, MD, and Raymond Magner of Grove Medical Associates say EHR implementation is just the first step.

Honors for innovation range from a mental joystick to delivering a unified view of a patient.

LAS VEGAS - As healthcare moves into a more globally connected environment and government programs, such as those from CMS determine what costs should be for providers, organizations must look toward non-labor needs to improve care outcomes and reduce costs, according to Mark Ziemianski, vice president, Business Analytics at Children's Health System of Texas. "In the past, companies have always looked at labor first because it's easier when addressing cost reductions," Ziemianski said. But to make sure patients are efficiently served and reduce redundancies, services must be aligned to meet the patient's needs. When it comes to improving quality, Pamela Arora, senior vice president, CIO at Children's Medical Center of Dallas said, "You get what you measure. "When we look at serving our community, we have to aggressively manage our costs," she added. "But at the same time, we're looking at how our models work in the community." And reducing costs doesn't necessarily mean cutting back. "It's a matter of figuring out where we need to re-channel resources," Arora said. "Quite frankly - high cost doesn't equal quality." Children's Medical Center of Dallas is a nonprofit, academic healthcare institution in Dallas-Fort Worth, made up of two full-service hospitals and is the seventh-largest pediatric healthcare provider in the country. Children's has been updating its care models over the past few years. Arora said they found analytics have improved patient care, by providing a visual to the community about quality and improvements. Instead of focusing on spending and how to reduce redundancies, Arora said executives need to go to the staff on the front lines to ask about their needs. In doing so, it can empower the staff and make them more open to change. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] "What we're trying to do is increase value and reduce redundancies," Ziemianski said. "We're no longer just looking at what we've done well, we're looking at everything. We took all of our staff and brought everyone back to fundamental training to improve care." "We saw real benefits on all accounts; including staff who could do their jobs better because they had more knowledge," he added. Contributing to the successful cost reduction and its acceptance within the organization, Ziemianski said was making it easier for staff to track their performance using analytics tools designed and implemented by Children's. 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.

CHIME touts OpenNotes partnership, early success of National Patient ID Challenge; opening keynoter talks challenges and opportunities of patient-generated data.

New tool analyzes data to pinpoint care gaps and identify service lines where patients are seeking care elsewhere. 

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute announced a plan to make it easy for individuals to access data in their electronic health records and share it for research that could improve care for their conditions.