Solving the Fundamental Information Problem in Healthcare with Leonardo
By: Mihir Pethe
Luminare was initially founded with an eye on sepsis and preventing it from ever happening on a hospital floor. We created Sagitta, our first product focusing on sepsis, to use the abundant information in a hospital to detect sepsis earlier. To make Sagitta, we had to think deeply about how we integrated with the electronic medical record (EMR) along with other data sources in the hospital and how we could combine that data to spot sepsis faster.
In the process of making and deploying Sagitta, we realized many of our clients had more issues with lower-level data issues. Many had trouble reporting basic operational metrics such as ICU lengths of stay, readmission rates, or time to antibiotics. Even if they had these numbers readily available, they often were not able to tailor reports in whatever way they wanted, but were at the mercy of their EMR system to handle reporting. Their reporting processes often involved a great deal of manual data entry, and sometimes required multiple nurses to focus on data entry full time.
With so many obstacles in the way, genuine quality improvement becomes far more difficult for our client hospitals and the thousands of hospitals around the country just like them. Information was not seen, and therefore not understood, and therefore not acted upon. We realized this chain of events was far more critical to understanding failures in a hospital than basic screens or protocols.
To help hospitals solve these problems, we knew we needed to help them shed light on their own information. Our goal would be to help hospitals visualize information, which would let them analyze it, and turn those insights into behavior.
After making Sagitta, our sepsis workflow tool, we had already made a good deal of what we needed to make Leonardo. Sagitta had to read the EMR system, use an AI based data scrubber to pull the relevant information from the EMR, and present real-time sepsis audit data. The goal with Leonardo would be to allow the user to have more control over the audit and reporting process. With the added control and flexibility in data reporting, hospitals could better understand all facets of their quality improvement challenges.
Because Leonardo’s fundamental value–add is to shed more light on the information a hospital generates, it can be revolutionary not just for sepsis, but for a variety of other challenges that plague hospitals. We are working on developing Leonardo modules for cancer, stroke, and heart failure. These modules will be able to read the EMR record with the AI data scrubber and pull information for patients with these conditions as well as patients likely to develop them. The information could be anything related to quality improvement for these conditions, from when they were identified in the clinic, specific clinical indicators, or time to treatment.
We hope that Leonardo will empower hospitals to use their information in whatever way they find best. We hope the flexibility Leonardo provides will allow hospitals to look at their data in a variety of ways without having to worry about the challenges around getting that data.
Interested in learning more about Leonardo? Reach out to us and our team would be happy to walk you through our solution.