NINJA Program, Supported by VigiLanz, Helps Prevent Pediatric AKI

Posted on March 28, 2019September 26, 2019 by Leo Bogee

The following is an excerpt from Pharmacy Practice News. For more information about the collaboration between VigiLanz and Cincinnati Children’s to reduce AKI, please read our press release and learn more about the solution that is functional and customizable for any hospital, regardless of EMR platform.

Dubbed NINJA, or Nephrotoxic Injury Negated by Just-in-time Action, a new solution enables real-time identification and monitoring of pediatric patients at risk for acute kidney injury (AKI) from exposure to nephrotoxic drugs.

So far, the program appears to be putting a significant dent in the problem—a greater than 40% reduction in AKI, which the authors contend has reached epidemic proportions in the nation’s hospitals.

Nephrotoxic medication exposure is one of the most common causes of AKI in children. “We know that children need nephrotoxins. These are lifesaving medications,” said Stuart L. Goldstein, MD, the director of the Center for Acute Care Nephrology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and primary developer of NINJA. “But children should only get the nephrotoxic medications they need for the duration they need them.

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VigiLanz Recognized for High Customer Retention, Innovation in KLAS 2019 Infection Control Report

Posted on March 14, 2019January 11, 2022 by Leo Bogee

MINNEAPOLIS – March 14, 2019 – VigiLanz, a clinical surveillance company, has been featured in the Infection Control 2019 Report from KLAS Research, released today. The report aggregates and analyzes interviews from thousands of healthcare professionals about the products and services their organizations use.

In the report, KLAS characterizes VigiLanz as a market leader for its high customer retention and innovative technology additions, such as active alerting, in its Dynamic Infection Control Monitor product. VigiLanz is also recognized for providing advanced automation and predictive analytics, two capabilities KLAS identified as highly desired by the market.

“Before we had [VigiLanz’s] Dynamic Infection Control Monitor, I did everything with manual data extraction,” said one anonymized user in the report. “I would have to run about 12 different reports to even get a list of patients to perform surveillance on, and I would need another six reports to get all the communicable disease reporting. [The] Dynamic Infection Control Monitor has made my job so much easier. It is a lot more efficient. I can easily get my patient list and go through it.”

Another anonymized user said, “We consider VigiLanz to be the leader in surveillance because of the flexibility of what we can do with the surveillance.”

VigiLanz’s Dynamic Infection Control Monitor is a seamless, real-time automated monitoring system that works with EMR systems. Its automatic exception-based alert system continuously surveils all patient records to alert decision makers in real time of potential infections, drug-bug mismatches, MDROs, isolation candidates, organism clusters, conditions of concern, and reportable infections. The surveillance is based on a sophisticated set of customizable rule engines.

“We understand how critical an infection prevention product is for patient outcomes and hospitals’ bottom lines, and we’re dedicated to the ongoing innovation that ensures we continue delivering what patients and the market needs,” said David Goldsteen, MD, CEO of VigiLanz. “In general, healthcare executives say infection prevention is one of the top five uses of clinical surveillance technology,[1] and it has rapidly become a critical component of quality patient care.”

The other top uses of clinical surveillance technology, according to healthcare executives, are:

1) Identifying adverse drug events
2) Promoting antimicrobial stewardship
3) Patient safety alerting
4) Managing readmissions

In addition to being a leader in this report, KLAS recognized VigiLanz in the 2019 Best in KLAS report, earning 2019 Category Leader designations for Antimicrobial Stewardship, Infection Control and Monitoring, and Pharmacy Surveillance.

About KLAS

KLAS is a research firm on a global mission to improve healthcare delivery by enabling providers and payers to be heard and counted. Working with thousands of healthcare professionals, KLAS gathers insights on software, services and medical equipment to deliver timely reports, trending data and statistical overviews. KLAS data is accurate, honest and impartial. The research directly represents the voice of healthcare professionals and acts as a catalyst for improving vendor performance. To learn more about KLAS and the insights we provide, visit www.KLASresearch.com.

About VigiLanz

Founded in 2001, VigiLanz (www.vigilanzcorp.com) is a privately held, rapidly growing provider of SaaS-based clinical surveillance solutions. The firm is focused on aggregating disparate EMR transactional workflow and documentation data across health systems to identify real-time clinical issues that avoid or minimize harm, optimize clinical outcomes and support preventive care. VigiLanz supports a large and growing community of hospital CMOs, CMIOs, CIOs, quality teams, infectious disease and control specialists, pharmacists, and other clinicians dedicated to real-time inpatient and outpatient care.

[1] Market Report: Clinical Surveillance: The Next Step in Value-Based Care. Feb. 2019. VigiLanz.

Three Ways Clinical Surveillance is Helping Prevent Patient Care Problems

Posted on March 1, 2019December 28, 2022 by Leo Bogee

Clinical surveillance can help healthcare systems more quickly identify clinical care problems, such as those related to medication errors and poor usage of antibiotics. But it can also help healthcare systems prevent problems from occurring in the first place.

That’s according to Bart Abban, PhD, director of analytics and data science at VigiLanz, who spoke about predictive analytics and clinical surveillance at the recent HIMSS Conference in Orlando.

“We’ve fully integrated a machine-learning platform into our real-time system,” said Abban, during his presentation. “We can look forward [at potential events], look in real time, and look back at historical data. It’s a fully closed-loop.”

Firm foundation needed

Much of the foundation of predictive analytics, Abban noted, comes from creating rules and alerts based on historical data. “You need a data repository,” he said. “We have vast amount of rich data, years and years of data.”

To view Abban’s full presentation, click here.

Health systems have many predictive analytics solutions to choose from. But Abban said VigiLanz stands apart because it provides a broader spectrum of alerts and customizations related to all types of patient care problems.

“With our platform you can do readmissions today, tomorrow you can start looking at mortality risk, you can look at adverse events, glycemic control,” he said. “We are currently developing a model on C. diff to alert clinicians to patients who are at high risk of getting C. diff. The sky is the limit.”

For more on how health systems are using clinical surveillance to enhance patient care, read “Clinical Surveillance: The Next Step in Value-Based Care.”

Three applications

Abban shared three examples of how VigiLanz is providing predictive analytics to health systems:

Sepsis

Since many hospitalized patients have symptoms that resemble sepsis, it can be difficult for providers to identify sepsis cases or identify patients who are most at risk. VigiLanz created a rules engine so that hospitals can use certain criterion—such as vital signs, labs, microbiology, comorbidities, and medications—to identify patients at risk. VigiLanz can then alert providers when patients are at risk, and providers can monitor these patients more closely and treat them proactively. Since data is updated in near real time, providers always have access to the most up-to-date information related to patients at risk.

Acute kidney injury

Certain medications are essential for patients, but they can also lead to acute-kidney injury. The conventional approach is to monitor patients via labs, however, that means providers can only intervene after injury has already occurred. VigiLanz created a series of risk factors that can help providers more closely monitor patients, and proactively adjust medications as needed.

Risk factors include:

High risk nephrotoxic medications
Other drugs administered
Age, race, chronic morbidities, ICU stay or surgery
Specific labs

Anomaly detection

VigiLanz created a rules-based engine to help health systems monitor the likelihood of a cluster or outbreak of hospital-acquired infections.. VigiLanz created alerts based on algorithms for various types of infections, and health systems are able to configure their own alert thresholds depending on their needs, areas of concern, and priorities.

Health systems using the VigiLanz platform to improve patient care and prevent patient care problems can rest assured that critical alerts won’t be missed by providers, said Abban. He noted that VigiLanz can track whether providers are taking actions related to the alerts they receive. If not, alerts can be reissued or the health system can follow up with providers directly. “It’s a whole ecosystem where you can extract the value of predictive analytics,” he said.