The healthcare industry and our company faced many challenges over the past few years; while it is undeniable that COVID-19 elevated visibility of facility struggles with infection control, these difficulties persisted long before the pandemic revealed their existence. During the pandemic, our number one priority was connecting with customers to understand their pain points and offer services to best support them. It is clear that digitizing the health record has become even more essential to more easily understand what is going on in healthcare organizations, protect providers by enabling remote visits, and improve data sharing during patient transitions. Many customers realized that without using our technology, they were not able to safely manage resident/patient care or leverage telemedicine effectively (to keep doctors safe).
In April of 2020, we launched our Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) solution to help Infection Preventionists and care teams perform ongoing resident surveillance, allowing identification and reporting of infections in real time in one centralized location. This helped to effectively understand and bring awareness to infections, as care teams need an efficient way to review and access centralized case information and facilitate transparency in reporting of infection information across their facilities and communities. The capabilities of IPC include: access to a central repository of infection cases to improve patient care management; automatic input of information documented in PointClickCare to replace the manual efforts required to compile infection case information; documentation of resident condition using industry accepted standards to correlate the symptoms of infections and ensure a consistent approach in all residents; interactive dashboards that display real-time infection case information; and the ability for Infection Preventionists to develop evidence-based recommendations based on infection analysis for clinical and nonclinical team members. A product with this breadth of functionality would usually take quarters or even years to develop, but because we were laser focused on what we needed to do, our release timeline was reduced to a few weeks. Using IPC, customers have improved how they identify and track respiratory infections and potential COVID-19 symptoms in residents quicker. Receiving an early warning helped staff move quickly ahead of potential cases and limit the spread of coronavirus across their communities.
In April of 2020 we also launched another innovative tool for the industry called PULSE COVID. PULSE COVID was a lightweight, easily implementable version of PULSE Enterprise that was offered at no cost to state and local response organizations during the early days of the pandemic. The Patient Search feature within PULSE Enterprise is a secure web-based portal that allows authorized clinical providers operating in non-routine settings (e.g., shelters and alternate care sites) access to national health information networks that contain clinical and medication history documents of millions of Americans. It is intended for use during state or federally declared disasters and public health emergencies and enables more informed, higher quality health care services for individuals who seek treatment in sites that are not usually equipped with an EMR or connected to health information infrastructure. The Missing Persons feature within PULSE Enterprise additionally allows health care providers who have been separated from their patients and family reunification specialists seeking to find lost individuals a mechanism to search participating hospitals, emergency departments, and disaster shelters to determine if the person has had a recent encounter in that facility. PULSE COVID was used by partner states to augment care in COVID antibody treatment sites during the pandemic. The full-featured PULSE Enterprise has additionally been used to support several wildfires and hurricane responses that ran concurrently to the COVID-19 pandemic. Most recently, PULSE Enterprise was activated in Florida for Hurricanes Ian and Nicole and in Oregon during the 2021 wildfire season. Prior to that, PULSE Enterprise was used in Louisiana during Hurricane Ida and in California during several wildfire seasons. Nora Belcher, executive director of the Texas e-Health Alliance, has described PULSE as “A game-changer for how we access disparate and siloed health information networks at the local, state, and national levels.
