Earlier this year, Netsmart Technologies, an industry-leading software company specializing in healthcare information technology, entered into an agreement with VNS Health to take a predictive, algorithm-driven model developed by our technology team and integrate it into Netsmart’s MyUnity electronic health record.
The predictive model assesses a hospice patient’s risk of dying over the next seven days, based on that patient’s medical record. Hospice teams can then use this information to schedule additional visits to patients who are at highest risk—ensuring that patients and families have the support they need during this difficult time in the end-of-life journey.
Besides contributing to better patient outcomes and experience, the model also supports improved quality scores on the CMS metric Hospice Visits in Last Days of Life (HVLDL) for hospice providers. After launching the model internally, we improved our own HVLDL scores by 65%.
Now, as the model becomes available to Netsmart’s MyUnity customers, our technology will have an opportunity to impact hospice patient outcomes on a national scale. Starting in spring of 2025, as a first step in the roll-out, four of Netsmart’s hospice customers will have the technology incorporated into their electronic health record platforms, bringing its benefits to over a thousand additional hospice patients.
This predictive analytics tool is just one of many that our technology team has developed to help improve outcomes for hospice patients at the end of life. Other examples include a proprietary automated model that hospice programs can use to predict a hospice patient’s length of stay, and another predictive model, still in the development stage, that will allow care management organizations and insurers to stratify the mortality risk of health plan members over the next 6 to 12 months.
“VNS Health is uniquely positioned to develop these types of predictive machine learning models,” notes Tim Peng, Executive Vice President of Science and Technology. “We have decades of data to draw on, deep operational expertise, and we have on staff a highly talented technical team.”
In addition, notes Peng, being a home care and hospice provider, VNS Health can demonstrate the value of these predictive models in a real-world setting. “We look forward to bringing more of our innovative products to the marketplace going forward,” he adds, “where they can be adopted and utilized at scale by other healthcare providers across the country.”
