XanthosHealth is honored to be a part of the Sync for Social Needs Initiative as announced today by the White House. Additionally, you can click here to read NCQA’s statement regarding this initiative and click here to read the summary from the Health Level Seven International (HL7). Our goal is to become a key player in an ecosystem aimed to improve the patient healthcare experience navigating social services. We are excited to diligently work alongside the rest of the participants in this initiative to inform the standardization of data elements needed to enable the sharing of social needs screening assessment data across electronic health records (EHRs) and third-party applications. Ultimately, these standards will allow hospitals to meet the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) requirements regarding social determinants of health (SDOH) screening, reporting, and interoperability beginning enforcement in 2024.
We believe that our perspective as a startup in this space will be invaluable to the initiative. Especially, given that our solution is 1) patient-centered and it allows for patients to self-screen, self-refer, and reassess their needs outside of a clinical encounter, 2) uses multi-faceted architecture design (separate interfaces for each key stakeholder), and 3) allows community based organizations (CBOs) to add and/or modify social programs in real-time, allowing for much greater visibility and engagement in pop-up clinics and other temporary community population health initiatives.
Over the next twelve months, XanthosHealth is on a path to implement our EHR-integrated platform – ConnectedNest – across various oncology provider practices. If you are interested in financially supporting and/or partnering with us, please contact us at: info@xanthoshealth.com
XanthosHealth’s vision is to be the bridge that carries the underserved and chronically ill to health via the most relevant and appropriate community support. Our mission is to improve health outcomes and reduce the total cost of care per individual by identifying and addressing the social needs of patients through health information technology and analytical solutions, connecting individuals to the most appropriate social services. Our current focus is on the oncology space where the patient experience and outcomes are greatly exacerbated by social needs.
THE HISTORY OF XANTHOSHEALTH
The First Big WIN: The Federal CHALLENGE.GOV program
In response to the Step-Up App Challenge led by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) in September of 2018, an interdisciplinary team from the University of Minnesota co-led by the XanthosHealth co-founder and University of Minnesota Professor Dr. Pinar Karaca-Mandic competed nationally. Team PRISM (Patient Reporting and Insight System from Minnesota) developed a smart-phone based application that collects patient reported-outcomes (PRO) data and integrates the data into the EHR securely by using the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards. The PRISM team won 1st place nationally in March 2019. The app also placed 2nd in the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) / HL7 App Competition in November 2019.
PRISM was developed to address the current deficiencies in collecting and using validated PROs as part of routine clinical care. The platform supports any PRO instrument and allows seamless data integration with EHRs via HL7 FHIR. The PRISM app complies with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and is architected to allow protected health information (PHI) and the patient generated data collected by the app to be stored and maintained both within and outside of the EHR. The app is hosted on secure HIPAA compliant servers and uses industry best practices for healthcare software development to ensure HIPAA compliance.
Click here to watch a short video on PRISM.
The Next Big WIN: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF)’s novel digital health solution discovery
In 2019, XanthosHealth co-founder and University of Minnesota Professor Dr. David Haynes won the “Social Determinants of Health Challenge” organized by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) in partnership with Catalyst @ Health 2.0 aimed at discovering novel digital solutions that can help providers and/or patients connect to health services related to SDOH. Consecutively, he led a team to compete in the AHRQ’s Visualization of Community-Level Social Determinants of Health Challenge, with a specific focus on visualization of SDOH data. The team designed the “Community Health Exploratory Analysis Platform” to better understand unmet social needs in the communities and became a semi-finalist nationally. This effort was further developed into the foundation to Smart Community Health (SCH), a recommendation platform that connects individuals with social needs to community-based organizations. Composed of a mobile application for individuals looking for services and a web application for social service providers to register and list their services and relevant information about their respective organizations, SCH was designed to help address pressing social, environmental, and health needs within our communities.
Click here to read the powerful story of Dr. Haynes and evolution of SCH.
Real-World TESTING, Part I: Interoperability with EHR in 9 clinic hospital system
Between September 2019 and March 2020, PRISM was integrated in 9 clinics across three different EHR systems: Cerner and NextGen as part of a pilot with the Medstar Health System in Washington D.C. The existing HL7 FHIR standards allowed for the PRISM app to quickly and easily switch from one HL7 FHIR server to another; and enabled a successful abstraction layer to bridge the mobile app and different EHRs.
This pilot provided our team with hands-on implementation experience in all aspects of the workflow starting with determining patient eligibility, simplifying patient enrollment, gathering patient consent, and improving patient usability and engagement. PRISM was released as open source under the Apache 2.0 license. Click here to access the code.
For more detail on an announcement on PRISM’s pilot by AHRQ you can reference the following articles – AHRQ Blog, PRISM Final Report.
Real-World TESTING, Part II: Confirming patient access and ease of communication
SCH was demonstrated at a large health fair in College Park, Maryland in September 2019. Its first pilot was at NorthPoint Health & Wellness Center, a Federally Qualified Health Center in Minneapolis and took place from October 2021 to March 2022. XanthosHealth worked with 20 patients from the health care homes team and 18 CBOs. The pilot confirmed that patients were able to access social services and CBOs were able to communicate easily with patients using SCH.
XANTHOSHEALTH – A UNIQUE BLEND OF PRISM & SCH
A mobile Health Information Technology platform to help people with social needs connect and engage with social services
Recognizing that SDOH such as daily needs for food, shelter and transportation are types of PROs fundamental to the value patients receive from healthcare, Dr. Karaca-Mandic and Dr. Haynes joined forces in 2020 to launch XanthosHealth, and whose fully integrated solution – ConnectedNest – is built on the basis of these two innovative platforms, PRISM and SCH. Funded by a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Cancer Institute (NCI) from September 2021 to June 2022, ConnectedNest combines PRISM’s user-friendly interface to collect data from patients and store it in the EHR with SCH’s ability to search through and identify best matches between individual needs and services offered by community-based providers.
ConnectedNest, powered by XanthosHealth, is a novel Health Information Technology platform designed specifically for the social care referral process, through its data-sharing platform that connects individuals in need to CBOs through direct and/or clinician referrals. The platform is composed of three components: 1) EmpowerNest is a mobile app designed for patients, 2) CommunityNest is a web app that allows organizations to register their services and respond to clients, and 3) EngageNest is an EHR app that allows clinical teams to engage and refer patients to community organizations.
Key features of the platform include the following:
● HIPAA secure architecture keeps PHI safe.
● All patient generated data collected is stored and maintained in a secure HIPAA compliant environment.
● The EHR app is built using Substitutable Medical Apps, Reusable Technologies (SMART) on HL7 FHIR technologies.
● ConnectedNest can be integrated into any EHR system.
● The mobile app supports custom survey questionnaires such as PRO assessments.
● The mobile app supports end-to-end encryption of patient data.
Click here to check out our website or contact us at info@xanthoshealth.com for more information.