Accumen, CEO, BG Porter

Accumen is honored and humbled to be awarded the distinction of Healthcare Company of the Year. Accumen enables hospitals and health systems to do what they do best – provide the best in patient care and services. Right now, many hospitals are struggling with financial challenges, labor shortages, inefficient supply chains, blood inventory mismanagement, and antiquated ways to access and share data, which have jeopardized the whole healthcare industry and, most importantly, patient care.

Accumen partners directly with hospital and health system leaders to respond to current challenges and even thrive in today’s unpredictable and ever-changing environment. With a focus on lab operations, Accumen enables supply chain cost savings, establishes clinical transformation around anemia management and blood health, and leverages technology-enabled consulting services to solve complex hospital and health system issues.

Overcoming COVID’s long-lasting effects

Accumen’s team of lab experts guide health systems through a number of strategic lab decisions. Pre-COVID, the lab often was an overlooked asset of the health system. While an integral part of the care delivery, many c-suite leaders have focused on larger concerns while the lab moved along as expected, until the pandemic.

While everyone is ready to move on from COVID, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t continuing to affect how we operate today, specifically health systems. During COVID, the lab became the shining star of the health system, turning around tests with quickness, reassuring patients and clinicians alike that that they did not have COVID, and expediting treatment of those with COVID. But with COVID testing and treatment, came a need for additional lab staff, additional testing supplies, PPE, lab directors, all coupled with increased cost and demand.

Optimizing health system labs

With over 1,000 hospitals and healthcare system clients and more than 4,000 physician offices and clinics served, Accumen was already optimizing lab services for their clients. However, Accumen stepped up even more to resolve challenges and support hospital partners during COVID, understanding the dynamic challenges and demands put on clinical and leadership staff in the lab.

In 2020, Accumen client, Memorial Health Care System in Florida was responsible for delivering over 2 million COVID vaccine doses in the height of the pandemic. During that time, the health system also struggled with supply chain and cost challenges. Within the first year of implementing the partnership, Memorial attained over $1,000,000 in savings. The primary focus was on three main lab categories, and with Accumen’s support, Memorial was able to drive down chemistry pricing by 11%, tissue diagnostics by 21%, and hematology pricing improvements of 38%. Post-COVID, Memorial’s volume continues to grow, which provides additional savings opportunities and volume-based discounts, even accounting for inflation. Memorial’s lab services are guided by Edward J. Peterson, MBA, MT (ASCP), vice president of Laboratory Services at Memorial Healthcare System. “I’m passionate about ensuring we are always making the best decisions for the healthcare system to provide the best care and service to our patients. Addressing supply chain directly supports overall patient care and reduces operating costs.”

To-date, Accumen’s targeted best-in-class solutions have generated the following in lab optimization:

• Over $300M in total cost savings for customers 
• 15-25% in average client bottom-line lab cost savings
• Over $130M in annualized supply chain expense savings

Transforming hospital labs through strategic consulting

Another key component for labs is making smart strategic decisions. According to Gartner, “Bad strategic decisions cost organizations an estimated 3 percent of profits.”

Accumen’s strategic advisory services provide tailored solutions to complex laboratory challenges encountered by health system leaders. The team of expert consultants deliver unparalleled guidance to gain revenue, growth, and service expansion. In addition, they also support efforts with consolidation and cost reduction, joint venture or dissolutions, and master planning space design – overall, they deliver the right strategy at the right time.

In 2022, Accumen’s strategic advisory services advised health systems on strategic initiatives with a financial impact of over $1 billion.

Key strengths enabled by technology

Accumen is uniquely positioned to support hospital and health systems in ancillary clinical care. These services are designed to provide end-to-end services, software and analytics for health systems. One of those services is Comprehensive Patient Blood Management (cPBM). cPBM is a patient-centered, systematic, evidence-based approach to improving patient outcomes by managing and preserving a patient’s own blood, while promoting patient safety and empowerment.

In 2022, cPBM created the following impact: 

• 49,393RBC units reduced 
• 74,090 potential length-of-staydays avoided
• 108,665 potential nursing hours saved
• 1,976 potential complications avoided
• 445 potential deaths avoided
• $42.4M activity-based savings
• 12% RBC reduction

Establishing Anemia Management as a Standard of Care

Did you know that at least one third of patients in a hospital or health system have a common and modifiable condition that negatively affects their health, quality of life and work productivity? What is it, the answer is anemia.

Despite how common it is, anemia is not considered normal. And, unfortunately, too many patients with undiagnosed anemia undergo elective surgery, and wind-up receiving blood transfusions. These transfusions are not only preventable, but they are also increasing patients’ chances of morbidity and mortality, contributing to higher healthcare costs, increasing length of stay, and resulting in future hospital readmissions that are non-reimbursable.

So, how do we bridge the gap between screening for anemia and ensuring all patients receive the care they deserve? That is where Accumen’s MyBloodHealth comes in. This patented system-wide anemia management platform helps hospitals and health systems manage anemia in a simple, efficient, and cost-effective manner. Hospitals no longer need to rely on manual processes and multiple data sources to meet the needs of their patients. Even with the workforce shortage pressure, hospital staff can do more with less and not worry about sacrificing patient care. Plus, MyBloodHealth integrates with any EHR, eliminating the need for manual processes. MyBloodHealth systemizes patient workflows, triages patients, and creates custom care plans, enabling health systems to manage up to 50 anemic patients per day with virtually the same resources. Comparatively, even a highly efficient clinician can only manage about 8 anemic patients per day due to manual processes that include multiple checkpoints, handoffs, data risks, and other headaches.

Recently, a three-hospital health system in the Midwest, with 3,300 providers and 34,000 employees across 70 locations, previously transfused 17% of its patients, using 2.2 red cell units per patient. After launching MyBloodHealth, this health system avoided 833 transfusion exposures over an 18-month period, reducing their usage to 1.4 red cell units per patient and transfused only 1.6% of anemic patients.

Similarly, another large health system with 18-hospitals serving the Philadelphia, PA region, Jefferson Health, implemented MyBloodHealth and anticipated saving $2.6M over three years in blood acquisition costs, and creating $8.3Min additional revenue and savings. After one year of implementation, they have avoided 269 potential complications, reallocated 15,000 nursing hours, and already improved their margin by over $5.8M.

MyBloodHealth increases savings and improves patient quality of care

In June 2022, a 500-bed hospital in Western PA launched its anemia management program leveraging Accumen’s MBH software solution. Hospital clinicians began screening all high blood loss elective procedures and worked on improving its processes to ensure more patients were processed and optimized through the program. Over time, the anemia management program experienced an increasing patient load. Within six months, this health system was exceeding ROI goals and seeing improved patient outcomes with anemia management.

Within the first nine months of implementing the program, this health system attained the following results:

• 73% labs completed in MyBloodHealth
• 36% patients identified as anemic in MyBloodHealth
• 21% patients optimized with pre-operative treatment by PSAM  
• 18%reductionin blood acquisition cost savings 

The initially projected financial impact was a conservative amount per month. However, margin improvement from implementing Accumen’s cPBM program exceeded three times the projected savings, per month and continues to increase. The healthcare system is actively enhancing profitability, conserving scarce resources, and most importantly improving patient safety and clinical outcomes.

Exciting Roadmap for the Future

Over the past decade, Accumen has developed relationships with leading health systems throughout the U.S., including Jefferson Health, University of Alabama (UAB Health), Northwestern University, University of Illinois, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, UNC Health, Stanford Medicine, and Indiana University.

Accumen has created a paradigm shift by providing not only expert analysis and recommendations for key operational and clinical decisions but also dedicated technology and lab benchmarking resources that expand the productivity of provider teams through shared services and managed resources. 

With the goal of always improving patient outcomes, clinicians and healthcare executives now have insights into their lab operations and blood utilization metrics thanks to Accumen’s vendor agnostic interoperability solution, AccumenConnect™.  This technology accelerates connectivity between health systems, providers, and payors.These solutions include clinical data exchanges, order management solutions, and clinical data services.

Additionally, the Accumen Performance Suite™, Accumen’s cloud-based benchmarking platform is designed to support lab operations through analytics. This industry leading dashboard enables users to have a better understanding of their staff utilization, costs, lab orders, and opportunities. Lab managers can manage continued process improvement through a suite of six modules that include lab productivity, testing utilization, lab outreach analytics, quality and service, and lab stewardship.

A seventh module centered around cPBM analytics is also being unveiled as part of the Accumen Performance Suite. This module provides access to a health system’s red blood counts, platelets, and plasma utilization within a health system. Users can benchmark each site’s blood usage against similar hospitals around the country, thereby providing the necessary knowledge to improve patient safety, care, and outcomes. Further, Accumen is eager for what the future of healthcare holds, particularly when it comes to making healthcare better, faster.

Accumen also features 3DR Labs, the largest 3D medical image post-processing lab in the U.S., which provides 24/7/365 access to more than 200 expert radiologic technologists. 3DR Labs provides services to hundreds of hospital imaging departments, stand-alone imaging centers, and radiology practices, with turnaround times for CT and MRI exams are guaranteed within hours or even minutes.For a comprehensive list of Accumen’s offerings, visit Accumen.com.

Callout:

Since 2011, Accumen Inc. has provided technology-enabled consulting services to solve complex hospital and health system issues. Their efforts have been recognized by a myriad of clients, “Accumen is purpose-built to transform clinical labs from cost centers into drivers of clinical and financial impact – a mission achieved through an unmatched roster of experts, decades of lab experience, and proprietary technology offerings. Accumen helps health system leaders transform lab operations, technologies, and processes to improve clinical and financial outcomes.”