Page 13 – Bamboo Health

Celebrating Black History Month

Posted on February 15, 2022January 29, 2024 by Grace Keeling

Bamboo Health takes pride in building a culture where every teammate feels welcomed and valued. We embody this culture by celebrating heritage months throughout the year with internal events for Bamboo Health employees. Check out the e-mail below with a statement from Chief People Officer Annie Edwards about what Black History Month means to us as an organization.
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Today begins the celebration of Black History Month! For 28 days, we reflect on and recognize the many contributions Black people have made to our country and the world.

Black History Month was first introduced as “Negro History Week” by Carter G. Woodson and his organization known today as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). The ASALH organized the first celebration of “Negro History Week” in 1926 by encouraging schools and communities across the nation to host celebrations, lectures, and establish history clubs. By the late 1960s, “Negro History Week” evolved into Black History Month on college campuses and was officially recognized in 1976 by President Gerald Ford.

This year’s theme, “Black Health and Wellness” aligns perfectly with our mission and vision of improving healthcare for all. Black people have made great contributions to healthcare in the U.S. Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performed the first successful open-heart surgery in 1893 and Dr. Charles Richard Drew was a pioneer for blood plasma research and the development of blood banks.

Black Health and Wellness doesn’t just focus on traditional methods of care such as primary care or ER visits, but also mental and emotional health. Through our solutions we can have meaningful impact for communities of color across the nation coordinating care and improving healthcare for all.

This month you will have opportunities to learn, experience, and celebrate some of the contributions Black people have made throughout history.

•            Black History Month BINGO
•            The Music of Changemakers
•            How We Become Free: A Black History Meditation

And for other ways you can get involved this month check out the following resources and organizations:

•            Black Health and Wellness Resources
•            Resilient Coders
•            Hack Diversity
•            Blacks in Technology

Annie Edwards

Bamboo Health Annual Impact Report ’21

Posted on January 28, 2022October 28, 2022 by Grace Keeling

In 2021, Appriss Health + PatientPing Became Bamboo Health to Enable Better Care for Patients Across the Physical and Behavioral Health Continuum

Appriss Health was focused on delivering important, actionable patient data and analytics to clinical workflows, while PatientPing was focused on providing real-time alerts around care events. Today, Bamboo Health—a name which reflects bamboo’s strength, flexibility, and growth in nature—is focused on those same things, but also on creating one of the largest and most diverse care coordination networks in the country. In 2022, we look forward to continuing to build this network and empower payers and healthcare professionals to collaborate for the sake of better whole person care and lower costs.

Common benefits of care coordination include lowering emergency department utilization, preventing hospital readmissions, reducing unnecessary procedures and tests, decreasing medication errors, and treating physical and behavioral health conditions more holistically.

“We’ve spent the last eight years trying to change the face of healthcare in this country… we’re going to provide the data, the insights, the functionality, and the support to enable providers to coordinate care across health systems, across geographies, in real-time, and at the point of care like never before,” said Bamboo Health CEO Rob Cohen.

With customers in all 50 states, Bamboo Health is currently serving:

2,500+ hospitals
7,955 post-acute facilities
25,000 pharmacies
32 health plans
45 state governments
Over one million acute and ambulatory providers

43 of the nation’s 54 prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) rely on Bamboo Health’s software solutions, including:

1,090,000+ healthcare providers accessing PDMP information in workflow
145,000+ facilities integrated nationwide
106,000,000 patient encounters per month, with controlled substance insights delivered directly into electronic health records (EHRs) and pharmacy management systems

While Bamboo Health wasn’t formally introduced until August 31, 2021, we accomplished quite a bit and reached several milestones over the last year.

Fighting America’s Opioid Epidemic

The U.S. is experiencing a behavioral health epidemic exacerbated by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is spiking substance use disorder (SUD) rates. November 2021 provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics found that drug overdose deaths rose by nearly 29% over a 12-month period ending in April 2021, to an estimated 100,306. Opioids remain the leading cause of drug overdose death, accounting for more than 75% of deaths during the time frame.

To make matters worse, behavioral health providers are struggling to keep up with surging patient demands. At the same time, we are seeing increased awareness of behavioral health needs and SUD treatment that is helping to decrease stigma. Those two forces have led to more people seeking care; however, affordable, quality care is often hard to find.

This dynamic is more evident in Delaware than in any other state. With the nation’s second-highest drug overdose mortality rates, Delaware’s Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health needed a referral system that encompassed the entire continuum of behavioral health services. The Delaware Treatment and Referral Network (DTRN), powered by Bamboo Health’s cloud-based OpenBeds platform, now facilitates rapid referrals and fosters collaboration among mental health, SUD, and medical providers.

The State of Delaware has realized remarkable results:

As 2021 came to a close, the DTRN hit an outstanding new milestone: 100,000 referrals. This represents 100,000 opportunities to improve the lives of citizens.
By assisting providers with the onboarding process to encourage adoption, Delaware expanded the number of active users in its referral network by 264% in the first year. The variety of distinct services offered by receiving organizations expanded in the first year as well, growing from 40 to 109—a 173% increase.

Efficiently Managing Patient Populations

Another growing issue is the inability of healthcare organizations to track their patients in order to make the most informed medical decisions. We’re changing this with our Pings solution, which offers real-time notifications when patients experience care events.

Monarch is a North Carolina statewide provider of comprehensive specialty mental health and human services that serves 28,000 patients with intellectual and developmental disabilities, mental illness, and SUDs.

In 2018, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Center for Mental Health Services awarded Monarch a Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics (CCBHCs) Expansion Grant, designed to provide patients access to health services including 24/7 crisis intervention. As a result, Monarch needed the ability to follow up with patients in a timely manner and provide coordination with other care providers.

With only four months to comply with the requirements needed to become a CCBHC, they turned to Bamboo Health. Since 2019, Monarch has leveraged our Spotlights solution for interactive, real-time dashboards of high-priority performance metrics to track operational trends. They also began a 1,500-patient trial of our Pings solution. After the initial one-year implementation, Monarch expanded their partnership 10-fold with Bamboo Health to cover all 28,000 lives with Pings.

With Pings, care managers at Monarch receive real-time alerts when their patients are hospitalized, allowing them to check on the patient, pass along valuable information to the care team, and schedule post-discharge appointments and follow-up care.

Looking Ahead to 2022

As we mentioned, our main goal in 2022 is to grow our behavioral health care coordination (BHCC) network. We have thousands of organizations and over one million healthcare professionals in the network, but we envision connecting all payers, providers, and even patients across America. And we envision a new level of collaboration between primary care physicians, specialty providers, and health plans to reduce care costs, and ultimately, improve outcomes for the delivery of whole person care.

To borrow a few more words from Rob, “True care collaboration is at the heart of our company’s vision, as it’s one of the most powerful tools to help improve outcomes and reduce unnecessary encounters and costs. To us, true care collaboration means delivering comprehensive, actionable insights to all care settings, providing workflow tools to enable clinicians to intervene, and supporting clinicians in providing holistic care… Not only does this allow for providers to better prioritize and coordinate care plans, but it also enables improved patient health outcomes—regardless of the provider or care setting.”

For more on fighting the opioid epidemic and efficiently managing patient populations, and additional information about our accomplishments and goals, read our full 2021 Annual Impact Report.

Webinar Recording: What’s Next for E-Notifications?

Posted on December 16, 2021June 8, 2023 by Grace Keeling

The deadline to comply with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Interoperability and Patient Access Rule Electronic Event Notifications Condition of Participation was May 1, 2021. In short, the rule requires hospitals to send admission, discharge, and transfer (ADT) notifications to patients’ other healthcare providers. The intent was to promote care coordination and value-based care, but for some, the rule has meant more work and red tape, while resources are low in part due to the continuing pandemic.

Bamboo Health’s Manager of Government Affairs breaks down the current implications of the rule as well as what it could forecast for the future of healthcare interoperability. Plus, we’ll help navigate CMS’s Interpretive Guidance for the rule, particularly regarding what hospitals need to know about “reasonable effort” and “making every attempt possible” to achieve compliance.

Coordinating Behavioral Healthcare for a Healthier America

Posted on December 16, 2021October 12, 2022 by Grace Keeling

Uncoordinated behavioral healthcare has cost America money, and more importantly, lives, for far too long. Today, we’re working to fix it.

Seemingly forever, patients’ medical records have been scattered about, first in paper files on office shelves and now on servers in data centers. To get one record from here to there—and to get it in the hands of the right clinician at the right time—has been a logistical nightmare. Picture a long chain, but with a missing link.

Today, this problem translates to an array of measurable issues for all of healthcare, two of which are most crippling: high, often unnecessary costs and compromised care. These issues are a direct result of primary care physicians (PCPs), specialists, and other care team members, along with insurers, being unaware of their patients’ whereabouts on the care continuum—particularly, the behavioral care continuum—and unable to effectively manage their care.

To illustrate the magnitude of the cost issue, the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA, estimates that the “total annual costs of waste were $760 billion to $935 billion” in one year. That’s nearly one trillion dollars in unnecessary care, or nearly one quarter of the total annual healthcare spend in America. This plagues patients and their insurers and hinders value-based care efforts.

As for compromised care, consider the high utilizer who repeatedly visits the emergency department (ED), or the individual with a behavioral health disorder who is admitted to a treatment facility, both without their PCP’s knowledge. This leads to less communication between their PCPs and specialists, which can result in inefficient administration of medication, procedures, and tests, a lack of timely follow-ups, and even harm.

State health departments, health information exchanges, and other entities have long worked to consolidate, secure, and share relevant patient information on a large scale. While they have certainly made progress and will continue to play a major role moving forward, they operate in a somewhat fragmented environment and don’t necessarily foster communication among providers and between payers and providers. In addition, behavioral health and crisis event data remain siloed at a time when access to such data is more important than ever amid a worsening opioid epidemic.

A recent study on healthcare coordination conducted by researchers from the Commonwealth Fund highlighted this problem. “Compared to physicians in other countries… U.S. physicians did not routinely receive timely notification or the information needed for managing ongoing care from specialists, after-hours care centers, EDs, or hospitals.” Furthermore, “Ensuring the continuity of care delivered in settings outside the four walls of a primary care practice, but with the involvement of primary care through timely information exchange, is a central prerequisite for coordination.”

This is precisely why Appriss Health + PatientPing became Bamboo Health. We combined a company defined by data and analytics and another defined by real-time information sharing for the improvement of care coordination.

“We have created one of the largest and most diverse care collaboration networks in the country, connecting nearly one million healthcare professionals in all 50 states and virtually all care settings including primary and specialty care, emergency departments, urgent cares, inpatient facilities, skilled nursing facilities, post-acute facilities, behavioral health treatment centers, pharmacies, home health agencies, state health agencies, and social and human service agencies, among others,” said Rob Cohen, Bamboo Health’s President and General Manager. “Our powerful network serves the largest hospital systems in the U.S., 45 state governments, every national pharmacy chain, 37 payers including the top eight health plans, and 7,800 post-acute facilities.”

As Rob alluded to, we’re here to coordinate behavioral healthcare by growing one network on one platform. By connecting PCPs with specialists, payers with providers, and behavioral health with physical health. By fostering communication with data, analytics, and real-time alerts. And by keeping the patient at the center. It’s coordinated care that can reduce costs and save lives.

We’re the missing link in the chain. And we’re just getting started.

How the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Rule Creates a Vision for Interoperability and the Delivery of Whole Person Care

Posted on December 2, 2021June 9, 2023 by Grace Keeling

As of May 1, 2021, U.S. hospitals must comply with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Interoperability and Patient Access Rule electronic event notifications (e-notifications) Condition of Participation (CoP) requiring hospitals to send Admission, Discharge, and Transfer (ADT) e-notifications to all requesting post-acute providers, primary care providers, and primary care entities.

The CMS e-notifications CoP is designed to help hospitals better serve their patients through improved care coordination and enhanced interoperability among providers. This is done by requiring hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, and critical access hospitals to share electronic ADT-based care e-notifications with other community-based providers and care team members, including post-acutes. This means that all hospitals utilizing an electronic health record (EHR) service provider or other electronic administrative system that is conformant with the content exchange standard HL7 v2.5.1, must make a reasonable effort to send real-time electronic notifications.

For reference, CMS states that the reasonable effort means sending the ADT e-notifications:

At: the point of inpatient and observation admission, discharge, and transfer, and at emergency department (ED) presentation and discharge;
To: the patient’s established primary care provider (PCP), established primary care practice group or entity, other practitioners, practice groups or entities identified by the patient as primarily responsible for his or her care, and applicable post-acute providers who need to receive notification for treatment, care coordination, or quality improvement purposes;
Containing: at minimum the patient’s name, treating practitioner’s name, and sending institution’s name.

While the deadline for hospitals to comply with the CMS E-Notifications CoP has passed, it does not mean a hospital’s job and mission to improve care coordination is done. Despite the rule now being in effect, many hospitals have begun to think about the road ahead and how it’s beneficial for new care approaches like whole person care. These approaches can allow healthcare providers that have integrated a CMS-compliant solution to introduce new levels of visibility into a patient’s care journey with e-notifications.

Reaching Beyond the E-Notifications CoP Toward Interoperable Whole Person Care Coordination

Over the past few years, there have been numerous changes to the interoperability and value-based care landscape. With new rules proposed and finalized, innovation models created and phased out, directional changes in the industry are favoring a focus on care coordination. With rules from ONC and CMS, and updates from CMS and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), the industry continues to rapidly evolve and look to support future care coordination needs.

By requiring hospitals to send real-time e-notifications at the point of inpatient admission, discharge, and transfer, and at ED presentations or discharges, CMS took a step forward to ensure that all providers will ultimately have access to timely information to further care coordination. The result is an advancement toward the growth of value-based care delivery models and increased interoperability across the care continuum, with each of the two further driving the other.

While much may change in the coming years, care coordination remains at the heart of both sides of this equation. Sharing real-time information via ADT events about patients’ care encounters across providers introduces new levels of visibility for respective care teams, driving whole person care initiatives which can reduce ED utilization, prevent hospital readmissions, avoid unnecessary procedures and tests, eliminate medication errors, treat behavioral health problems holistically, and identify and manage social determinants of health.

New technology solutions are now supporting whole person care and can ensure that hospitals achieve compliance with the CMS e-notifications CoP and deliver enhanced value-based care coordination initiatives. By enabling healthcare providers with insight into the patient care journey, they gain a new understanding of all the issues that an individual is dealing with so they can prioritize and coordinate care plans to improve health outcomes.

At Bamboo Health, our healthcare solutions are facilitating exactly that. No matter who the provider is, no matter what the care setting is, they can look at the individual as a whole person and uniquely coordinate how they are going to care for that patient. This technology, paired with our expansive national footprint, arms healthcare providers across the country with a greater view into all of the conditions that an individual is managing, creating a whole person view that powers whole person care.

To learn more, check out our ebook:

EBOOK: the route to compliance: now that we’ve arrived, what’s next?

Three Key Takeaways from HLTH 2021: Driving Change through Care Coordination to Transform Whole Person Care

Posted on October 28, 2021June 9, 2023 by Grace Keeling

Bamboo Health recently had the pleasure of exhibiting at HLTH 2021, which served as the first opportunity to unveil our new company brand in person since launching in late August. HLTH also provided a great chance for our team to participate in important discussions with an esteemed group of healthcare leaders, government officials, policy experts, politicians, and tech influencers. Below is a summary of the three key takeaways from our discussions that will help to shape the healthcare industry’s future.

1. Care is Moving Beyond Hospital Walls

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, older adults are expected to outnumber children in population size by 2034, with 65-year-olds and over projected to number 77 million, which comes as no surprise as the Baby Boomer generation continues to age. As a result, the home healthcare industry represents one of the fastest expanding industries in all of healthcare. The Home Care Benchmarking Study by Home Care Pulse projects that in 2021, there will be approximately 9,000 more home care agencies than there were five years ago. This follows 2020, a year in which U.S. home care spending reached an all-time high of $113.5 billion.

COVID-19 has accelerated this trend, making it more acceptable for people to seek accessible and affordable care options. Beyond home healthcare providers, points of access now include retail clinics, behavioral health clinics, and community centers. As the population continues to age and patients increasingly choose to remain in their homes, the boundaries of clinical capacity will continue to extend beyond traditional physical and geographic lines.

2. Consumerization of Healthcare

Adding to the growth of home healthcare, it’s never been clearer that how we access healthcare is changing. In the past, when we got sick, we all traveled a similar patient journey utilizing primary care providers or hospitals; however, that paradigm has shifted. Patients increasingly prefer to receive convenient care via today’s technologies.

From telehealth options to at-home testing kits to remote monitoring systems to primary care in retail pharmacies, these developments, along with increased public openness to receiving new methods of care, have forced providers to partner with tech companies on solutions. This shift in how we access care has the potential to enable a more personalized, cost-effective, value-based care delivery model.

3. Value-Based Care is Here to Stay

While there have been numerous changes to the value-based care landscape over the last few years, the acceleration toward value-based care models is still hot. This is partly due to the emphasis that federal and private payers have placed on increasing access to care and lowering total cost of care. And this underscores the importance of products and services that put the patient’s whole care experience first. Through effective care collaboration about patients’ care encounters across the physical and behavioral health spectrums, care teams gain new levels of visibility to improve care quality, reduce total cost of care, and minimize post-acute spending and unnecessary emergency department visits.

Bamboo Health solutions enable just that by supporting one, connected network—all with care coordination and total cost of care top of mind. For example, we recently announced that Bamboo Health’s national network of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) generated over $1 billion in total shared savings in 2020 under the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP). Bamboo Health’s ACO partners achieved this success in the value-based care program by utilizing our Pings solution, which provides real-time visibility into patient admission, discharge, and transfer (ADT) care events. Pings enables ACOs to identify high-utilizers, monitor post-acute length-of-stay, and apply timely interventions to reduce emergency department to inpatient conversions.

The Future of Healthcare

In closing, we are encouraged by the positive input and feedback that we received at HLTH. The event provided a refreshing reminder that innovation in the healthcare industry—and transformational change—is well on its way.

At Bamboo Health, we believe the key to better care rests in ensuring that all participants in the care continuum have access to real-time patient data and the ability to coordinate and collaborate with other providers. Whether patients are at home or utilizing the latest technologies to meet their needs, real-time information provides clinical intelligence to successfully prioritize and deploy services and ensure seamless care transitions, while also creating optimal opportunities to deliver on the promise of value-based care.

We look forward to leveraging this positive momentum as we continue our work creating one of the most comprehensive, diverse care collaboration networks in the country.

Webinar: The Power of Pings: How a Statewide Mental Health Provider Tracks and Manages its Patient Population

Posted on October 15, 2021June 9, 2023 by Grace Keeling

Recently, we presented a webinar: The Power of Pings: How a Statewide Mental Health and Human Services Provider Tracks and Manages its Patient Population with Real-Time Notifications. The webinar was a joint effort between Bamboo Health and our customer, Monarch. Since 1958, Monarch has provided the state of North Carolina with comprehensive specialty mental health and human services; Today, they serve 28,000 patients. They pride themselves on providing a nurturing environment for people with intellectual and development disabilities, mental illness, and substance use disorders. You can learn more about Monarch, here.

Over the past few years, Monarch experienced a growing challenge: the ability to efficiently track and effectively manage their patient population. With Monarch’s growth came a more diverse patient population, based on geographic area, medical history, type of insurance, and more. Additionally, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Center for Mental Health Services awarded Monarch a Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics Expansion Grant. While the grant provided opportunity, it also set strict regulations related to patient care coordination.

To answer this challenge, Monarch partnered with Bamboo Health to implement Pings, which delivers real-time notifications to care team members when their patients experience care events across the continuum. Pings helped Monarch become more informed on both a broad scale and provider-level scale.

Monique Lucas, vice president of integrated care at Monarch, had this to say, “After about a year with Pings, we realized the value that it brought. We were able to utilize the data to build dashboards that gave us a clearer picture of what we were dealing with and how to handle our hospitalization population.”

To hear much more from Monique about how Pings revamped Monarch’s healthcare coordination efforts, check out our webinar recording.

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