OSF HealthCare is piloting a new clinical intelligence platform designed to help medical providers quickly identify meaningful trends in patient data without interrupting care or adding clicks to already busy workflows.

The platform, called CliniPane, was developed through OSF Innovation and interfaces with a patient’s electronic health record, surfacing key insights at the point of care. Leaders say the goal is to reduce information overload while supporting faster, more informed clinical decisions.

Roopa Foulger, vice president of Digital Innovation Development at OSF Innovation, says the Peoria-based health system’s innovation ecosystem provided end-to-end support to develop CliniPane. That ecosystem includes internal funding through Jump ARCHES and Community Health Advocacy grants and academic research partners at the University of Illinois in Chicago and Urbana-Champaign.

The project also required collaboration with clinicians to understand what information is most useful during patient visits. Foulger says that early groundwork allowed the team to focus on real clinical needs before scaling the technology.

A new way to see data

OSF Innovation Senior Fellow Jonathan Handler, MD, who launched the effort and served on the research and development team, says traditional decision-support tools often rely on alerts or buried menus that can disrupt care or go unused.

“At the end of the day, we just wanted a new way to surface information to help clinicians during the care that they provide without making them do work and without interrupting their workflow.”

Rather than generating alerts, the platform displays relevant trends, such as lab values moving in the wrong direction. That information is directly within the clinician’s view and tailored to the provider’s role and the patient being seen.

“You may not notice that this person has been trending downward and that that’s a sign of something wrong, and by showing it (with CliniPane), we can potentially help them identify the underlying problem earlier so it can get diagnosed earlier and treated earlier.”

Dr. Handler says surfacing useful data can also help providers decide about whether to adjust medication types or doses.

Visual trends at the point of care

Visualization of data via CliniPane is something Dr. Handler sees as an important feature for patients as well. Physicians in the early testing group reported that during patient visits, they anticipated turning their screen around to show patients the same data they were reviewing.

“That might be something really meaningful to help patients to be empowered to participate in their own care, to understand their health and to see the impact of the changes that they make in their own lives and how it can impact their health.”

There are current solutions that can surface insights for clinicians in a patient’s electronic health record but usually not in a way that doesn’t require clicking to new screens or that allows future uses to accommodate external data from things such as smart watches or ever-expanding AI software. Foulger says that’s what’s different about CliniPane. It’s a platform that can be enhanced.

Built to Scale and Adapt

“Any data can come in – whether it’s variable data, whether it’s data from your EMR (electronic medical record), whether it’s data from a remote patient monitoring system we have, and that’s how the structure is. So, we can integrate more data that might be able to generate insights which, at the end from a user experience standpoint, ensures that it’s going to be valuable for the clinician.”

Foulger points out that researchers and developers also spent time collaborating with Information Technology leaders at OSF to ensure the platform securely protects patient data. It was a huge lift, Foulger says, to ensure data goes only to the right medical provider and that only data needed for decision support was provided at every level.

Because of those and other challenges, developers had to pivot many times. In fact, Foulger says there were at least 50 test versions of CliniPane.

“This is almost a new blueprint that we created at OSF in how you need to build these solutions that can fit with the growing needs on the AI side and how it needs to integrate with security.”

Physician feedback

Justin Holschbach, MD, an OSF HealthCare primary care physician in Bloomington, Illinois, has participated in the pilot. He agrees that the visual trend lines available via CliniPane have been helpful, especially for diabetes management.

“So, if we’re talking about diabetic control and an A1C, you were able to just kind of – in the corner of your screen – see whether the line was holding steady, going down or going up without having to click into multiple labs and see that in a different screen and get off of your space in Epic.”

The platform is currently being tested by a small group of primary care providers, with plans to expand access as technical validation continues. Developers say ongoing feedback from physicians is shaping future enhancements and helping determine which data points provide the most value.

Holschbach sees a future with expanded uses of data, and he believes CliniPane will eventually become standard of care, at least at OSF HealthCare. Innovation leaders believe CliniPane could eventually support multiple specialties and even improve patient health outcomes by turning complex data into clear, actionable insights without adding burden to clinicians.

Video clips with Dr. Jonathan Handler

Video clips with Roopa Foulger and Dr. Justin Holschbach

B-roll-CliniPane

As we begin a new year at OSF HealthCare, we’re reflecting on 2024 and the major strides in digital transformation to make access to care and health information seamless for our patients. At OSF, we continue to collaborate with our academic and business partners to leverage collective expertise and to responsibly use the power of artificial intelligence, always taking care to use guiding principles of what is fair, appropriate, valid, effective and safe (FAVES).

The efforts are highlighted here in our Top 10 Digital Health and Innovation stories of 2024 in no particular order.

1. OSF Unveils new 55+ primary care service in south suburban Chicago: Called OSF Complete Care 55+, this is a unique collaboration between OSF HealthCare Little Company of Mary Medical Center and OSF OnCall, the digital arm of the health care Ministry. When launched in early 2025, this primary care program will incorporate in-person visits, plus a mix of virtual care, digital health monitoring tools and 24/7 access to a care team focusing on those with chronic conditions.

2. Building an AI prepared workforce: OSF HealthCare leaders took just six weeks to develop mandatory training about generative AI for all 24,000 OSF Mission Partners (employees) because tools were already publicly available. Melissa Knuth, Vice President of Planning, outlines that to rise to the challenge, she worked with OSF Innovation to use mixed media to keep the content interesting and tapped generative AI tools to assist with the content creation.

3. OSF Digital Hospital patients in Rockford area say it’s the best medicine: OSF OnCall expands its digital hospital program to Rockford and receives rave reviews from some of its first patients. In addition, a well-known farm broadcaster shares her story about receiving acute-level care from the comfort of her own home and urges others who are eligible to consider the option.

4. OSF Innovation sets the table for solution to prevent cancelled surgeries: Two OSF HealthCare nurses turned to the OSF Innovation Studio team to help improve their Device Table software that serves as a database for implanted medical devices – offering information needed for surgical teams to reference for safety in surgery planning. We also reported on the creation of a spin-off company, OpenSurg, which will license and promote widespread sales of Device Table and related support features.

5. OSF HealthCare experts: ‘Establish guiding principles when developing digital care strategy’: OSF OnCall was a spotlight vendor and presenter at this year’s American Telemedicine Association’s annual Nexus conference in Phoenix, Arizona. OSF OnCall Senior Vice President Jennifer Junis advised during her presentation that health systems use guiding principles when developing their approach to digital health and to involve clinicians and patients when piloting new programs and digital tools. OSF HealthCare has also become a founding member of an ATA Digital Center of Excellence.

6. Mapping the future for early diagnosis of rare diseases: A Jump ARCHES grant-funded project with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is using generative AI and knowledge graphs that map symptoms to detect rare diseases. Adam Cross, MD, who leads the OSF Children's Innovation Lab in Peoria, Illinois, wants to create a point-of-care tool for primary care providers to help patients get an early diagnosis of a rare disease.

7. Health economist: Connectivity and trust can expand telehealth: OSF OnCall hosted its first-ever digital health symposium which drew nearly 150 clinicians and vendors. Keynote speaker health economist and advisor Jane Sarasohn-Kahn stressed evidence-based digital technologies can improve health outcomes, but health systems need to build trust and expand community partnerships to increase engagements.

8. Fast-Tracking Hope: Rapid Intake at the OSF Cancer Institute: OSF HealthCare began 2024 with the opening of its new comprehensive Cancer Institute, offering advanced radiation therapy such as brachytherapy and proton beam therapy.  It also launched a new rapid intake system, developed by OSF OnCall and OSF Innovation to offer a single point of contact through OSF-HOPE (844- 673-4467) so cancer patients can be immediately connected to treatment and support services.

9. Piloting a smarter colonoscopy: OSF HealthCare St. Joseph Medical Center piloted artificial intelligence-backed colonoscopies, using a company called GI Genius, to improve detection of precancerous polyps. During the pilot, the adenoma detection rate (ADR) averages increased among all patients involved to as high as 12%, while individual physician ADR increased as high as 32.8%. The technology is now being implemented across the OSF Ministry.

10. Testing the path to better concussion diagnosis: An OSF Innovation lab-designed FlightPath app is now being tested by athletes at Illinois State, Bradley and Illinois Wesleyan Universities. The app only takes about two minutes to collect more than a million data points as a person tries to catch a hummingbird within a 3D space on a screen. The clinical trial could last two years. 

The President’s Cancer Panel is a federal advisory committee that reports on barriers to progress in reducing the burden of cancer. This year, the panel is conducting a series of public meetings to discuss the current landscape of patient navigation.

Dr. Handler specializes in digital solutions to optimize care. Along with researchers from OSF HealthCare and the University of Illinois, Dr. Handler published research demonstrating a doubling of cancer screening rates after technology-assisted interventions were implemented for economically disadvantaged women who were late (often two years or more) in their breast cancer screening. Together with another set of researchers from those same institutions, Dr. Handler developed AI to better balance the workload of nurse navigators for cancer patients to avoid burnout and provide the best care.

Dr. Handler believes AI should be developed which can effectively, ethically and equitably support cancer care, regardless of a person’s race, ethnicity or where they live. OSF HealthCare recently joined a national collaborative to provide input on new AI guidelines. 

OSF HealthCare will soon expand cancer services across its Ministry when the OSF Cancer Institute opens on the campus of OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria in February 2024. It will offer the second proton-beam therapy location in Illinois as well as serve as a site for clinical trials, advanced treatment, therapy and a wide range of support services.  

Targeted text reminders and other interventions erased disparity in the rate of breast cancer screening between economically advantaged and disadvantaged patients, according to an OSF HealthCare study published in Population Health Management.

While screening has been shown to reduce breast cancer deaths, women who are economically disadvantaged are less likely to have breast cancer screening and more likely to die of the disease, often because the breast cancer isn’t detected until it reaches a more advanced stage. Mammography screening rates plummeted during the COVID-19 pandemic, which only increased the disparity between economically advantaged and disadvantaged patients.

OSF HealthCare researchers analyzed the effectiveness of interventions created and supported by the OSF OnCall digital health team to reduce that disparity, with: text messages that included a link to schedule a mammogram and information about the importance of breast cancer screening; calls from a digitally-enabled community health worker (CHW) to help schedule mammograms and solve challenges such as transportation; and an invitation to a health fair offering on-site mammograms. Breast cancer screening rates more than doubled among Medicaid patients who received interventions.

The National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) guidelines recommend annual mammography for most women beginning at 40 and earlier for women at higher risk for breast cancer.

 “Previous studies have found that similar interventions help increase the rate of breast cancer screening, but not whether they would reduce disparities among different populations,” said Jonathan A. Handler, MD, FACEP, FAMIA, senior author of the study and senior fellow, OSF Innovation at OSF HealthCare.

The study included more than 4,000 women in two groups: an economically disadvantaged group (those with Medicaid coverage), and an economically advantaged group (those with private commercial insurance). All were 41 or older, were aligned with an OSF primary care physician and appeared to be overdue for their mammogram – typically by two years or more. All with Medicaid were randomly assigned to one of three intervention arms and compared with a subset of commercially insured women randomized to receive no intervention

All in the Medicaid group received the first intervention (at least one text message reminder). The moderate intervention arm also received additional educational content, a reminder text after a mammogram was scheduled, and phone outreach by a CHW to answer questions, assist with scheduling a mammogram, and address other issues related to the screening. The third arm had all of those interventions, and also received an invitation to a health fair where attendees could participate in interactive educational activities, schedule a mammogram or receive a same-day mammogram at the health center after attending the event.

In the Medicaid group, the rate of mammogram screening more than doubled following the interventions, from 5.4% to 11% of eligible patients. Interventions targeted only to the Medicaid group reversed the disparity in screening rates. Before interventions, the Medicaid group had 2.6% lower breast cancer screening rate than those with private insurance. After the interventions, the Medicaid group’s screening rate was 3.7% higher than those with commercial insurance who had been randomly assigned to receive no intervention.

Medicaid covers mammograms

Researchers determined Medicaid participants who had moderate to maximum intervention had a significant improvement in screening rates. Many in this group were reluctant to get a mammogram because of the expense until learning from a CHW that appropriate screening is covered by Medicaid.

Screening rates also increased after intervention among privately-insured women who were assigned to intervention arms. Therefore, researchers said economically disadvantaged women might require more intense intervention than their economically advantaged counterparts, with private insurance, to close the disparity gap moving forward.

“The goal is equity in health outcomes, not always standardization of an intervention or what we think of as equality. So it’s vital to strategically implement interventions among patients who would most benefit,” said Sarah Stewart de Ramirez, MD, MPH, principal investigator of the study, medical director for Population Health Services at OSF HealthCare, and associate dean for Population Health Equity Innovation at the University of Illinois College of Medicine Peoria. “For example, we found that simply providing interventions such as a text message equally to the entire patient population might actually widen that disparity, because economically advantaged patients have fewer hurdles to access care and therefore are more likely to be able to act on those reminders.” 

Dr. de Ramirez added, “Ultimately, we hope to find an engagement approach that achieves equity while also improving screening rates for all women. It’s imperative that we continue to study new population based interventions so we can apply them with the same science as clinical interventions, and ensure our patient populations receive the highest level of care, wherever they are.”

The study was funded by the American Hospital Association’s Institute for Diversity and Health Equity and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois.

Visit osfhealthcare/innovation to learn more about how OSF HealthCare is working to transform health care.

Sample of video message for education efforts