Dr. Hamad Husainy is an emergency medicine physician who works in different emergency departments, and he states very clearly that, more often than not, he is inundated with data – very little of which is helpful at that moment in time.
He says emergency medicine physicians need the right data, in a digestible, usable and actionable format. And he adds that IT can do the trick.
He expounds on this tip here in this interview we conducted with him prior to his arrival at HIMSS25. Husainy also is CMO at PointClickCare, vendor of a care collaboration and value-based care platform, which will be in Booth 3454.
Additionally, he will be speaking in an educational session entitled “ED & Post-Acute Collaboration: Streamlining SNF Transfers with Real-Time Data,” Tuesday March 4 at 12:45 p.m. in the Venetian, Level 3, San Polo 3501. His co-speaker is Dr. Patrick McGill, chief transformation officer at Community Health Network.
Q. What is the main message you will be trying to get across to the hospital and health system attendees at HIMSS25?
A. The most crucial message we want to share is that health systems and hospitals can continue delivering high-quality care and help prevent avoidable readmissions after discharging patients to skilled nursing facilities. Post-acute care management technology lets providers and care teams track patients through their post-acute care journeys and know when to intervene to prevent unnecessary readmissions.
This approach facilitates seamless care transitions, improving post-discharge outcomes. Drawing on Community Health Network’s and Dr. McGill’s experience, clinicians in the emergency department or other hospital units can identify an optimal SNF and continue monitoring patients once they are discharged to that provider.
Historically, patients transferred to post-acute facilities arrive with a packet of paper forms about their hospital stay and care needs. Care managers at the hospital then needed to communicate by fax or phone to receive updates about patients, which is inefficient and often ineffective.
Due to the time delay and lack of care manager visibility, it can result in patient decompensation going undetected until an ambulance trip to the ED is required. However, today, care managers at hospitals can stay informed about their patients at community SNFs with real-time data and insights so they can detect and intervene before a health crisis arises.
This proactive post-discharge strategy can prevent costly and preventable ED visits and rehospitalizations that directly affect financial performance, especially under value-based care programs.
Q. What are a couple of the big technologies dominating this year and why are they important to healthcare at this moment in time?
A. The most prominent technology in healthcare and virtually all industries right now is AI. AI-powered physician note generation and other types of documentation systems are becoming common, but many provider organizations are also broadening their implementations, including support of patient outcome predictions.
For example, machine-learning kinds of AI can predict the likelihood of identifying patients most likely to be readmitted to the hospital within seven days. These algorithms are trained on data from millions of SNF residents and continually updated to improve accuracy.
These models outperform the gold-standard human predictions, LACE, a simple index commonly used to predict readmissions, by nearly 30%. Part of the reason is the AI models can consider many more patient characteristics and calculate an evidence-based risk score in a fraction of the time.
Q. What are a couple pieces of advice you will be offering CIOs and other IT leaders and workers attending HIMSS25?
A. My first piece of advice would be that they do not need to feel overwhelmed by the amount of data inundating their clinicians – and please don’t believe that just sending more data to them will be helpful. As an emergency medicine physician working in different emergency departments, I can attest that, more often than not, I am inundated with data, and very little of it is helpful at that moment.
The amount of data provided through multiple sources is extravagant, yet unusable in our clinical processes. Inside the ED, we need the right data, presented in a standard format (digestible), in a standard location (usable), and to be pertinent (actionable). PointClickCare has tools that deliver such data to clinicians at the bedside.
The other advice I would give them both as a clinician and a health-tech executive who has spoken with many provider and payer organizations around the country is that value-based care will continue to expand across public and private health insurers.
They need to be ready for this growth because I believe it is inevitable. The topic Dr. McGill and I are speaking about – streamlining transfers from the hospital to post-acute care – addresses a significant value-based care challenge: visibility into different care settings.
As we discussed earlier, when patients are transferred to an SNF or another post-acute setting, the hospital often must devote significant resources to monitor that patient because they don’t share the same IT systems. Even among preferred post-acute partners, patients can be readmitted to the hospital for reasons that would have been detected if the hospital were better able to monitor and collaborate with clinicians in the post-acute setting.
I would urge hospital and health system leaders that this “black hole” of visibility that we discuss in our presentation does not have to exist in their communities. They can identify patient decompensation, prevent readmissions without overburdening their care managers, and help patients shorten their stays in the post-acute facility.
Follow Bill’s HIT coverage on LinkedIn: Bill Siwicki
Email him: bsiwicki@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication
WATCH NOW: Seattle Children’s Chief AI Officer talks better outcomes through the technology