UPMC and Health Catalyst honored as recipients of the 2018 Microsoft Health Innovation Award
UPMC and Health Catalyst announced that they have been named joint recipients of Microsoft Corp.’s 2018 Health Innovation Awards.
The awards, which were announced at the 2018 HIMSS Annual Conference and Exhibition in Las Vegas, recognize health organizations and their technology solution partners for using Microsoft’s intelligent health technologies in innovative ways that help engage patients, empower care teams, optimize clinical and operational effectiveness, and transform health.
UPMC and Health Catalyst won for their use of the Health Catalyst CORUS Suite, a cost-management system co-developed by these two partners and based on Microsoft technology that has saved the health system millions of dollars. CORUS enables CFOs, physicians, service line leaders, and clinical and financial analysts to deeply understand the true cost of providing care across the continuum, and to relate those costs to patient outcomes.
CORUS’s Activity-Based Costing (ABC) platform identifies activities and calculates the cost of each activity, based on its actual consumption of resources and materials. CORUS also analyzes and delivers early and actionable insights to increase the cost efficiency of UPMC’s processes. Powered by embedded logic and access to the most granular activity and cost data, CORUS offers insights into profitability and variation and identifies cost-reduction opportunities. To do that, CORUS aggregates data from a wide variety of information systems, which makes it possible to assign direct costs, such as medications, supplies and labor costs, to patients based on their actual utilization.
UPMC has used CORUS’s activity-based costing and analytics to effectively drive cost savings and improve clinical outcomes in many of its service lines, including Surgical Services, Women’s Health, Orthopedics, and Cardiovascular. Overall, the CORUS Suite generated $5 million in supply savings and gave management insights into $42 million in cost reduction opportunities, including decreases in unnecessary clinical variation and more efficient deployment of OR labor. The time required to access cost information was reduced by up to 97%.
In Surgical Services, the ABC method helped produce $3 million in cost savings or cost avoidance over two years. This result represents the cost difference between baseline cases and the cases in the Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) program, in which UPMC surgeons follow protocols designed to reduce complication rates and facilitate faster recovery from surgeries.
Nominations for the Microsoft Health Innovation Awards were submitted by health providers, payers, pharmaceutical and life science organizations, and public and private health institutions across the world for applying Microsoft technology to create transformative and highly effective innovations. An esteemed panel of industry experts selected this year’s winners, based on how their innovation represents a forward-thinking development or implementation of a solution that is delivering groundbreaking results and producing better health outcomes for more people. Recipients will be highlighted on the Microsoft Health blog at www.Microsoft.com/Health.
