HEART TO HEART HOSPICE
Technology to improve lives Muse-Medalogix AI system is the latest system Heart to Heart has adopted . " Muse is an artificial intelligence system that provides a window into the EMR ", Abercrombie explains . " One of the large culture changes that happens when you replace paper with an EMR is that all the spreadsheets and three-ring binders ’ people used all of a sudden disappeared . All that information is on the computer now , and to get to it ; we trained constantly and developed a sundry of tools and dashboards for the agency staff to manage their census . But the Muse AI system has been transformational for us - you can quickly see where your patient resides , how many visits have been made and scheduled , diagnosis , vitals , and many other data points needed for daily patient care ."
The system even has a patient level trending chart , which includes nursing notes from past visits , to enable the nursing manager to build a better picture of why the patient might be in decline . " It ' s been instrumental in enabling the care teams to get their arms around the data and then to turn that into care ", Abercrombie says .
The AI capabilities provided by Muse have been particularly important in this respect . " Part of our mission is to be present [ with the patient ] at the most important time ," Lumsdon says . " Muse allows nurses to focus on where the patient is today , and it alerts our team if their condition changes . Coming from an oldfashioned paper world , I used to carry binders around when I was on call , containing a list of patients , their addresses and their medication . Now I can use my laptop or tablet to go into a chart in real-time and to see what ' s going on with the patient ."
" This also helps us to see any changes happening that we need to discuss as a team and if we need to increase our services . It ' s really helped us to see a patient ' s trajectory
- each illness process has its own trajectory , and Muse helps you to map this out over time ," Lumsdon says .
The ability to chart the progression of an illness is perhaps even more important in palliative care than primary services , for instance , because there is no second chance to get the care right . " A patient may be with us for four months . If we miss that patient ' s transitioning and we weren ' t there at the end , there is no do-over ," Lumsdom says .
" Guided by the data , we ' ve actually seen our visits go up in the last three to seven days of a person ’ s life . When we
260 August 2021