US Patent Issued to Intermountain Healthcare and Empiric Health for Methods to Improve Surgical Outcomes and Reduce Costs

Salt Lake City, UT -- (ReleaseWire) -- 01/14/2021 -- Intermountain Healthcare and Empiric Health, a fast-growing innovator in the AI-driven clinical analytics industry, announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued US Patent 20160259916 entitled "Systems and Methods for Improved Healthcare Cohort Reporting."

This patent is the result of a clinician-driven program at Intermountain Healthcare focused on identifying and reducing variation in outcomes for similar surgical procedures. The recently issued patent is assigned to Intermountain Intellectual Asset Management LLC and licensed exclusively to Empiric Health.

The patent systems and methods are based on a program called ProComp®, which was built by clinicians from Intermountain's surgical services clinical program to increase awareness of how variations in surgical procedures impacted patient outcomes and overall cost of care.

Historically, typical methods for aggregating clinical data use publicly available healthcare coding sources such as Medicare Diagnosis Related Groups, Current Procedural Terminology, or International Classification of Diseases, which often include a wide range of patients, procedures, or costs in the same grouping.

The new patent covers novel methods and processes to more accurately establish comparable procedures to identify cohorts of patients that are more clinically similar. This allows physicians to review data of highly similar patients, resulting in a more accurate "red apples to red apples" comparison that can lead to better informed clinical decision making and improved patient outcomes.

In 2017, Empiric Health was formed by Intermountain and Oxeon to commercialize the ProComp product for use in health systems across the country. The cohorting methodology represented in this patent forms the basis for the Empiric Analytics Suite.

Empiric has built upon the original platform by using natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to automate and expand the cohort process. Now in over 100 hospitals, eight health systems, and a database of over two million surgeries, Empiric's proven cohorting capabilities for surgical services provide foundational methodologies that lead to evidence-based best clinical practices across many procedures and episodes of care.

"The culture of innovation at Intermountain fostered the ideas that led to the development of this patent which represents years of work by a team of physicians, clinicians, and data architects," said Dr. Mark Ott, medical director at Intermountain Medical Center, and member of the patent team.

"This methodology of identifying groups of highly similar patients has been tried and tested at Intermountain and found to improve surgical patient outcomes and simultaneously reduce costs. We're excited these patented methods are available to be adopted by other health systems through Empiric Health," he added.

"I am grateful for being part of the team that contributed to the development of this original way of grouping comparable patients," said Ann Putnam MSN, RN, CNOR director, clinical product and vice president empiricist.

"We took the time to listen to physicians and devised a process that has improved the clinical relevancy of the data that physicians want to look at. It is exciting that Empiric is continuing to apply and expand this methodology to healthcare organizations across the country," she added.

About Intermountain Healthcare
Intermountain Healthcare is a not-for-profit system of 24 hospitals, 225 clinics, a Medical Group with 2,600 employed physicians and advanced practice clinicians, a health insurance company called SelectHealth, and other health services in Idaho, Utah, and Nevada. Intermountain is widely recognized as a leader in transforming healthcare by using evidence-based best practices to consistently deliver high-quality outcomes and sustainable costs. For more information about innovation at Intermountain, see Intermountain Ventures.

About Empiric Health
Empiric Health is an AI-powered clinical analytics and service company that focuses on identifying unwarranted clinical variation, improving patient outcomes and increasing the affordability of surgery. We combine powerful evidence-based data and clinician-to-clinician dialogue to produce results. Empiric differentiates with a proprietary comparative analytics methodology, coupled with Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in order to identify and reduce clinical variation, so that care providers can understand and optimize for high-value care. Empiric was formed by Intermountain Healthcare with assistance from Oxeon. For more information, visit www.empirichealth.com.

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