Driving healthcare costs down seems to hinge largely in part on the further development of Health Information Technology opportunities, according to various rumblings on Capitol Hill. A new collaboration between Aspect Medical Systems (AMS; Norwood, Massachusetts) and Cleveland Clinic seeks to prove just how effective HIT is on the healthcare landscape and how it can drive down costs.

AMS and Cleveland Clinic are starting a five year comparative effectiveness research collaboration focused on improving patient outcomes following surgery.

"We've had a number of smaller collaborations over the years, but this is the first one of this magnitude," Nassib Chamoun, president/CEO of AMS told Medical Device Daily.

Specifically the collaboration will use the clinic's electronic medical record system to identify anesthetic management practices that are associated with optimum outcomes.

These practices will then be tested prospectively utilizing real-time decision support methods. The company has also signed a licensing agreement with the Cleveland Clinic that will cover the intellectual property that emerges from the collaboration.

"Hospitals and clinicians are increasingly interested in delivering greater patient value by identifying clinical practices that result in better outcomes, higher quality and lower costs," Chamoun said. "We believe that anesthetic management decisions play a key role in enabling better patient outcomes. Through our collaboration with the clinic we will utilize our expertise in analyzing large clinical databases and the clinic's extensive clinical data registry to evaluate, on a patient risk and procedure-adjusted basis, how different approaches to anesthetic management impact patient outcomes following surgery."

He added that ultimately, the goal is to "define interventions and decision support systems that will lead to further improvements in clinical practice and patient outcomes."

As part of the collaboration, researchers will refine "risk stratification" methodologies to compare patient records from more than 85,000 surgical patients treated at the Cleveland Clinic with a baseline risk assessment system derived from 34 million patient records obtained from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

The CMS dataset is comprised of a wide variety of patient populations, medical procedures, and care environments, enabling researchers to fairly evaluate and compare adjusted hospital outcome measures such as duration of hospitalization, mortality at 30 days post-surgery and mortality after one year.

In addition to conducting this risk adjusted analysis of outcomes data, the collaboration will also include development of innovative comparative effectiveness methodologies to prospectively test how different anesthetic management interventions, decision support alarms, and clinician education initiatives impact outcomes when applied on an ongoing basis during routine clinical care.

With all of the talk of HIT and its potential impact on the healthcare landscape, Chamoun said that it made perfect sense for the company to team up with the Cleveland Clinic.

"The Cleveland Clinic is today where the country hopes to be five years from now," he told MDD.

When asked if both the company and the clinic would seek out other means of funding – that could possibly come from new provisions in any type of healthcare reform – Chamoun said it was a possibility.

"I suspect that at the right time we would apply for some type of HIT funding," he said.

So far preliminary results from studies conducted as part of this research collaboration have been accepted for presentation at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists (Park Ridge, Illinois) to be held Oct. 17-21 in New Orleans.

AMD also reported a decision by CMS to implement a coding methodology to allow hospitals to indicate when BIS monitoring was part of patient care. CMS has identified existing ICD-9-CM procedure codes for hospitals to report "intraoperative anesthetic effect monitoring and titration (IAEMT)" as part of the claims submission process to Medicare. IAEMT is the procedural description for BIS-guided anesthesia care.

In other agreements/contracts news:

• ISYS Search Software (Denver) a global supplier of enterprise search solutions for information access, management and re-use, reported that the FDA has selected ISYS Anywhere to provide its staff with secure mobile access to vital departmental content.

ISYS Anywhere is the industry's first universal mobile enterprise search solution to provide secure access across all major enterprise repositories, from individual PCs and workgroup file shares to large corporate portals and business applications.

• MedeAnalytics (Emeryville, California) a provider of healthcare performance management solutions, said it has entered into a multi-year agreement to provide University of Washington Medicine (UW Medicine; Washington) Quality and Compliance Analytics.

"UW Medicine chose MedeAnalytics specifically to meet the requirements and demands of the upcoming CMS RAC audit," said Robert Brown, spokesperson for UW Medicine Compliance. "We were especially impressed by MedeAnalytics' proactive approach to compliance and RAC through performance analytics."