Alpine Health Systems is pleased to announce the launch of an AI-based software platform that can improve hospital discharge for patients with complex health conditions, and in some cases, multiple social needs. The platform allows case managers to quickly identify at-risk patients to safely transition to an appropriate site of care.

Peoria, Illinois-based OSF HealthCare and its innovation catalyst OSF Innovation, along with Indianapolis-based venture builder High Alpha Innovation, served as partners for the development of Alpine’s tool that can benefit hospitals nationwide.

Hospitals are filled with increasingly complex and difficult-to-treat populations, including those entering the hospital with more than one chronic illness and comorbidities. These patients often have multiple challenges, including intensive medical care needs, complex family expectations, criminal history or inadequate home support. Caring for these patients in a hospital setting far beyond their geometric mean length of stay (GMLOS) results in massive costs for providers and a missed opportunity to care for patients who need it most.

Starting with a simple rules-based architecture and Machine Learning (ML) as well as Natural Language Processing (NLP), Alpine helps case managers who are critical to the discharge process to elevate complex cases earlier, reducing excess hospital stays and improving patient outcomes. The platform identifies and prioritizes important patient risk factors in advance of hospital discharge to ensure a holistic look at what will lead to the best setting and support for the patient.

Unlike competitors, Alpine leverages non-clinical and social determinants of health (SDOH) factors that might not be part of a patient’s electronic health record or be easy to locate within the record. Alpine’s software searches historical case notes for additional risk factors, ensuring a highly accurate risk profile in real-time. As Alpine is developed and refined, it will become more capable of recognizing the factors that can put a patient at increased risk of delayed discharge and matching those factors with appropriate recommendations for case managers.

Easing the job of hospital case managers should also help hospitals attract and retain individuals for these critically important positions, thus Alpine provides that additional value for hospitals and health systems. 

Alpine is led by Miami-based co-founder and CEO Humberto Alexander Lee, a seasoned health care technology veteran with experience in high growth, venture-backed health care companies. Lee has worked with diverse organizations such as HCA Hospitals, Cerner, Assurant Health and AXA Assistance. Lee is a serial founder and investor in the health care startup space. Prior to Alpine, he served as CEO of Statra, a health care analytics SaaS platform. He was co-founder and CTO of PxSource, which was acquired by Revolution EHR in 2015, as well as co-founder and CTO of Tesser Health, which was acquired by ELMC Group in 2019.

“Everyone in need deserves to be treated with love and care – that’s the driving force behind Alpine,” notes Lee. “We're thrilled to partner with OSF HealthCare and High Alpha Innovation to help both hospitals and patients with one of the most challenging problems facing health care today.”

“Launching a new venture such as Alpine has the power to change the world,” adds Elliott Parker, CEO of High Alpha Innovation. “This is a solution that the market needs, and the speed and learning power of AI will successfully get it into the hands of hospital systems much faster than other approaches."

Michelle Conger, chief strategy officer of OSF HealthCare and CEO of OSF OnCall Digital Health, says, “OSF Innovation is dedicated to leveraging technology and best practices to elevate care, and the launch of Alpine will both improve patient outcomes and reduce the cost of health care. We’re excited to work with Humberto and the team at High Alpha Innovation to bring to life this important innovative solution.”

All too often, during a holiday visit, an out of town relative realizes an aging family member seems a little slower, has tremors, complains of stiffness or spasms, or has difficulty moving through familiar spaces. How does the family know if those changes are a natural result of the aging process, or something more concerning such as Parkinson’s, ALS, dementia, or another serious neurological condition?

OSF HealthCare neuromuscular specialist Chris Zallek, MD, along with a team of researchers, are building a platform that will use digitized neurological exam information and artificial intelligence technology to help medical providers detect and evaluate neurological conditions. The goal is to support the triage and care for patients regardless of their location – in a primary or urgent care office, emergency department, neurology clinic, and even at home.

Dr. Zallek is the lead investigator of the NeuroHealth Lab at Jump Trading Simulation and Education Center in Peoria, Illinois. Zallek and engineers Minh Do and George Heintz at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with support from a Jump ARCHES grant, are trying to provide tools to help compensate for the critical growing shortage of providers who specialize in neurological care. The gap in neurologists in the U.S. is projected to increase to 19% by 2025.

The solution is called a Digital Neurological Examination (DNE). Dr. Zallek explains the exam can be done with a smartphone or tablet and currently records four distinct exam movements clinicians might observe to help assess an individual’s coordination, strength, balance, and movement organization.

The exam includes the patient rapidly tapping their finger and thumb, rolling their arms around each other, touching the pointer fingers of their hands to each other, and standing up from a chair and walking back and forth.

The DNE extracts from the recorded exams the 2D/3D human-body poses and quantifies clinically relevant features. This can help the provider to identify and follow changes in exam findings over time and aid in the diagnosis and care for people experiencing neurological conditions.

The platform will help physicians triage and care for patients with neurological symptoms regardless of exam location. Zallek says that’ll be a game-changer because the average wait time to see a neurologist is a month, and in some places across the country, there are “neurology deserts” where people have to travel great distances to get a diagnosis and treatment.

“This will hopefully help with the triage of the patients. We want to see all patients but there are some patients that need to be seen sooner rather than later. If we have tools helping us to say okay, this person, we need to get them in a little more quickly, or at least meet with them via tele neurology, it is an opportunity to improve care.”

Dr. Zallek and the team recently published their pilot research about the DNE.

DNE was evaluated on a collected dataset of 21 volunteers with normal and simulated-impaired movements. The overall accuracy of DNE was demonstrated by evaluating the recorded movements using various machine learning models. The results show an accuracy for detecting differences between normal and simulated impairment beyond 90% for upper-limb tests and 80% for the stand-up and walk tests.

The next step is to continue the research recording 100 patients experiencing neurological conditions and demonstrating abnormal exam findings. New care paths will also need to be tested to learn how these digitized tools can best help clinical teams care for patients.

Dr. Zallek hopes the research will alert others engaged in similar efforts at other health systems and universities to consider a collaboration.

“It would be great if one of the outcomes from the publication was collaboration with other institutions that are working on similar problems with similar solutions. In the end, we're all trying to help care for patients better. And what we'd like to do is get tools out into the clinical workflows as soon as we can, when they're ready, to improve patient care and lower the cost of health care.” 

Video clips with Dr. Chris Zallak, lead investigator for the  NeuroHealth Lab, OSF Jump Simulation and Education Center

B-roll for new digitized neuro exam