When providers are evaluating how well they care for patients, they look to something called a risk-adjusted score to steer them in the right direction. Accurate risk scores are contingent upon solid patient data, which is abundant in the adult population but scarce when you are looking at children, especially children with complex conditions.
“Children are not little adults,” said Trudy Leidich, vice president of quality and medical staff services. “The course of care for a cardiac patient in pediatrics is very different than a cardiac patient in adults. We need to understand those differences so that we can better design the future of care for these kids.”
That’s why Texas Children’s, along with Children’s National Hospital, have invested in Configo Health Inc., a health care data and analytics company specializing in pediatrics.
Configo Health is addressing the lack of credible benchmarked data accessible both to administrators and clinicians working in pediatrics, and to patients and their families. Using both machine learning and more traditional retrospective analytics, Configo Health delivers actionable insight with near real-time relevance to improve patient safety and achieve better outcomes for children.
By creating a dataset that will cover the breadth of pediatric care, Configo Health will provide public ratings organizations with the option to use risk-adjusted performance data to assess the quality of care delivered by hospitals across the country more effectively.
“Today’s six month lag for benchmarked pediatric outcomes data just isn’t acceptable,” said Texas Children’s System Chief Quality Officer Dr. Eric Williams. “Configo’s move to near real-time insight will be a game changer for driving improvement. Quicker access to this validated data means better decisions can be made at the bedside leading to improved outcomes for the patients and families we serve.”
Configo’s analytic tools will integrate multiple pediatric data sets to accurately establish standardized risk scores, allowing providers to internally and externally compare themselves and push for better patient outcomes. Providers at Texas Children’s and Children’s National will be able to critically look at patients’ health outcomes, their risk scores, and understand why they had the outcome they did.
“If you look at just pure administrative data, it’s not going to capture the outcomes that you need to see in that complex patient population,” Leidich said. “We’re leveling the playing field.”
Connecting various data sources and generating a standardized pediatric risk score will also help children’s hospitals better compare their performance to each other.
“Having a risk-adjusted database allows for children’s hospitals that are big and complex to understand what we really are improving on and if we are outperforming,” Leidich said. “We’ll know there’s a value to the care we give.”
Experts in extracting administrative data from pediatric hospitals, Configo Health provides HIPAA-compliant processes, secure data storage facilities, data cleansing and sophisticated analytical processing. By analyzing and evaluating data, organizations can reduce serious safety events, reduce mortality rates, optimize length of stay and reduce readmissions.
“We are delighted to announce Texas Children’s Hospital and Children’s National Hospital, two of the top children’s hospitals in the nation, as our founding investors,” Configo Health CEO Craig Manson said. “These relationships go well beyond capital and will allow us to develop solutions that truly meet the needs of pediatric hospitals and their patients and families.”