Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh have developed PENY, a patient experience navigator designed to provide real time feedback to hospital administrators.
Description
Patient experience plays a crucial role in the amount of reimbursement received by hospitals from Medicaid and Medicare. With up to 25% of reimbursement related to patient experience, poor results lead to financial losses, with some hospitals losing $50m in reimbursement alone. PENY can improve patient experience by allowing administrators to discover and rectify issues rapidly. With over 7400 hospitals across the US, all needing better systems of monitoring and improving patient experience, the potential market for PENY is $1.9bn.
Applications
1. Real-time collection and analysis of patient experiences in hospital
2. Improvement in reimbursement from Medicaid and Medicare
3. Better patient care
Advantages
Currently, the patient survey, Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS), is only carried out after the patient is discharged and can take over a year to feedback to the hospital. This gap in real time feedback can lead to delays in the change required to improve the patient experience, and so the cycle continues.
PENY is designed to overcome these problems with real-time data collection and analysis, producing real-time feedback. This approach combines and fully integrates feedback from all elements of the patient experience from mood to treatment, collecting more information than HCAHPS. The PENY interface is designed to be easy to use, allowing patients to add experiences as they occur, collecting information on food, environment, and relationships with healthcare professionals, allowing administrators to view real time results and rapidly improve patient experience.
Invention Readiness
The prototype for an app has been developed and a pilot study in UMPC hospitals has been carried out. A yearly subscription-based business model has been developed determining that a roll out across all UPMC hospitals could yield $4,000,000. with the potential for hospitals to receive more than 50-fold ROI due to improved reimbursements.
Future work to integrate PENY into bedside Smart TV would further improve accessibility to all patients along with gamification to encourage and assist feedback from patients, allowing them to have a more active role in rating their hospital stay experience.
IP Status
Patent Pending