Holon Solutions-A Gateway to Information-intelligent Healthcare
The influence of technology in healthcare globally accelerated during Covid-19. In the context of communicable diseases, healthcare systems underwent enormous strain and evolution. Further, with the unprecedented demands on information access across clinical, technical, administrative, payment and care delivery boundaries, a smarter system was required to make an immediate and sustainable impact.
“It took heroic efforts of people in practice and their support teams to corroborate extraordinary amounts of information in acute care, ambulatory and home care settings,” explains Jon Zimmerman, CEO, Holon Solutions. “As we all know, the ambulatory care settings went through an extraordinarily rapid transformation to include virtual care as a new normal extension of how and where to get care. And the majority of those efforts were manually driven.”
Well before the pandemic, Holon Solutions has been at the forefront of empowering healthcare practices and providers by removing operational burden with its patented technology that delivers curated, precise, and demand-driven patient information from any health IT system to the right hands, at the right time.
The continued search for the right information from an expanding variety of sources is one of the key contributors to burnout, suboptimal care, and rework-driven waste. “We know that more intense and disruptive information demands are being placed on the practices at exactly the same time when chronic diseases continue to expand and the workforce is beginning to shrink. This is not good for anyone,” Zimmerman says.
Personalized information delivery and use is the key to value generation, increased efficiencies, and the ability for healthcare teams to perform at their very best. This requires eliminating distractions and addressing the lack of personalized information flow from the complex healthcare ecosystem. To transform a system riddled with antiquated manual practices, Holon abides by the wisdom, ‘doing the same thing and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.’
Many of Holon’s customers are maximizing the value brought from their enterprise’s population health platform by delivering prioritized gaps in care and coding to their providers at the point of patient care.
“We can capitalize on extraordinary technology and innovation to solve the challenges of today and enable a smarter system to serve our families. We are committed to enabling healthcare teams to perform at their very best without distraction,” says Zimmerman. Holon’s patented technology is an intelligent set of listeners activated by trigger events within the user workflow. By recognizing users and patients in context, the sensors mine authorized information sources to identify and deliver what’s important and helpful for that user and patient at that point in time. Vital information which would typically remain siloed, is sourced back to the users and their workflows in a personalized manner, allowing them to accomplish their tasks. Additionally, Holon leverages system telemetry regarding who is taking what actions to give customers an overview of how things work and opportunities for optimization over time.
Holon’s offerings include the CollaborNet® platform and flagship applications, Insights and Referrals. Insights delivers information about gaps in care that must be addressed and identifies the need for accurate coding on the backend. As an intelligent healthcare information delivery network, Holon sources coding and care gaps from external analytics like population health management systems. “We do not make the analytics, but we find, retrieve and deliver them,” adds Zimmerman. “Most of the healthcare information may be buried deep in foreign documents and systems. Also, Insights helps practices ensure they comply with HEDIS measures and provides complete risk information for accurate coding.”
Holon’s customers are maximizing the value brought from their enterprise’s population health platform by delivering prioritized gaps in care and coding to their providers at the point of patient care. The users get exactly the information they need, delivered in a way they want, to help them deliver comprehensive, appropriate care anywhere. “Together, we can track key behaviors and adherence to this content through our telemetry and embedded analytics capabilities,” says Zimmerman.
The Referrals application is designed to connect primary and specialty care delivery with community-based organizations, and to enable network integrity to ensure that referrals are within the health systems’ contractual boundaries. Similar to the Insights application, the Referrals application captures information from the system of record and packages it in a desirable way for the receiving entity in the network. The information is delivered in a way that meets end-users’ criteria of receiving information so that all stakeholders can operate effectively together. “In addition, we provide conversational opportunities, because we know that so many of the interactions in healthcare require appropriate real-time clarification and oftentimes additional supporting documentation,” adds Zimmerman. “We make it easy for both the senders and the receivers to connect dynamically and have an appropriate and authorized conversation. This allows them to spend more time serving patients and less time working between the information chasms of our fragmented ecosystem.”
Holon’s leadership team, involving a diverse mix of experienced and successful leaders, fuels the firm’s passion for making a difference in healthcare. “We are all products of our collective lifetime experiences. I am very fortunate to have worked with the brightest minds over the last 35 years,” expresses Zimmerman apprising about the healthcare environment of complexities, rework, waste, and underperformance created by a lack of design principles and practices in its foundation. CollaborNet – cemented by the principle of appropriate levels of listening with collaborative innovation – fosters deep understanding of customers. “This provides the needed guidance and empathy to solve challenges in a highly impactful and sustainable way,” added Zimmerman.
Holon has worked with some of the top thought leaders in applying advanced and intelligent solutions across the industry. “We also know that the new API economy must run on a better common language, namely FHIR from HL7. We are pleased to be part of the community to work with some of the leaders at HL7 and collaborate on their Advisory Board,” Zimmerman says. Holon also works closely with the American Academy of Home Care Medicine, a professional organization committed to improving care of patients in the home, to understand best practices and elevate delivery mechanisms with useful information. “We need to ‘skate where the puck is going’ and it is clear that the more we can collaborate to help deliver the best possible care as close to the home as possible, everybody wins,” he adds.
An example of this collaboration came when the water crisis erupted in Flint, Michigan. Area leaders knew they had to deliver specialized care to those impacted immediately. The community needed an effective collaborative communication system to help ensure that the people who needed special treatment and support were quickly and effectively routed to the resources that were available. Holon responded, spurring development of its Referrals application. Since then, the application has evolved to support ongoing provider needs for specialist referrals, as well as flexing to support emergent needs, such as streamlining appointments and intake at Covid-19 vaccination clinics.
For the future, Holon plans to make its presence strongly felt by addressing ongoing demands for new cases, delivering to new geographies, and partnering with innovators both in content and program capabilities adding to the expanded value of its network. “As of today, we have two flagship applications and our customers are asking us for more. We are working with key industry leading organizations to develop additional use cases. In 2022, we will be creating more,” reveals Zimmerman.
