Highmark to predict infectious disease spread with Kinsa
Highmark touted Kinsa's insights, which include prevalence of fever and other symptoms, and how quickly illness is spreading.
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In the wake of a "severe illness season," Highmark Health is teaming with Kinsa to deploy its real-time illness insights and season forecast to predict healthcare utilization, recognize staffing needs and plan emergency department and ICU bed capacity when infectious diseases like COVID-19 and influenza spike.
Kinsa is an insights solutions business using data and advanced analytics to track and forecast the spread of illness and predict corresponding demand for healthcare products and services.
Highmark touted Kinsa's insights, which include prevalence of fever and other symptoms, affected geographies and how quickly illness is spreading. According to the former, these have been shown to accurately forecast the spread of existing diseases weeks to months in advance, and predict the emergence of novel outbreaks like COVID-19 approximately two weeks before an outbreak occurs.
WHAT'S THE IMPACT
Highmark Health's integrated delivery network, Allegheny Health Network (AHN), will be the first health delivery system to utilize Kinsa's early warning system to model staffing needs and bed capacity. The company cited research showing a 50% reduction in forecasting errors for businesses utilizing Kinsa in other industries.
"In the current healthcare labor environment, anticipating our staffing needs is critical to our ability to provide optimal care for our patients," said Dr. Brian Parker, chief quality and learning officer, AHN.
Getting ahead of these operational changes is imperative in the event of a regional surge in infectious disease, he said, because emergency and ICU volumes increase even as staff members themselves are getting sick, affecting the number of available caregivers.
"When caregivers get sick, we have to shift our personnel," said Parker. "Knowing which communities will be affected first will allow us to allocate our resources in a much more strategic way."
Kinsa aggregates data from many sources, and collects the "missing ingredient" data from a proprietary network of millions of households to accurately forecast spreading infectious illness and corresponding demand for healthcare products and services.
THE LARGER TREND
Highmark entered into another partnership in 2022 when it joined Allegheny Health Network in collaborating with Cedar to improve the patient's financial journey in a program that went live in October.
The model brings together the explanation of benefits with the hospital bill for a single source of truth. In addition, the program includes health savings account balances to help remove fragmentation in billing. This is the first time Cedar is integrating HSA balances.
Twitter: @JELagasse
Email the writer: Jeff.Lagasse@himssmedia.com
