An American health-tech startup has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) software which can predict when hospital patients will suffer a fall, according to a Bloomberg report. A patient fall is defined as an unplanned descent to the floor triggered by physiological conditions such as fainting or external factors such as a wet surface. According to the report, nearly one million hospitalised patients hit the floor every year and a third of these falls result in injuries, including fractures and head trauma. California-based Qventus Inc has attempted to solve the problem of nurses who miss distress signals or calls from patients because of'alarm fatigue' - sensory overload from various hospital sounds and alerts. Qventus' programme extracts and analyses all the data from call lights (the button patients press when they need help), bed alarms, and electronic medical records.

In early March, M Health Fairview, one of the largest health systems in Minnesota, got an urgent message from one of its vendors: Mountain View, California-based artificial intelligence startup Qventus. The 13-hospital system had contracted the company to help streamline its operations, but Qventus CEO Mudit Garg saw a more pressing need ahead. "I will never forget this," says Dr. Karyn Baum, vice president of system clinical operations, recalling the email she received from Garg. "It basically said, 'We're worried about Covid. And we really think we might be able to help you. Do you want to talk?"

Reductions in patient length of stay have been shown to reduce costs and improve outcomes. There are a number of ways for hospitals and health systems to reduce length of stay, the majority of which are time-intensive and center on restructuring existing operations. To help bolster and streamline efforts to reduce length of stay, systems such as New York City-based NewYork-Presbyterian have turned to artificial intelligence technology from Qventus to automate care coordination, which not only improves efficiency but also eases the administrative burden on hospital staff. During an Aug. 6 webinar hosted by Becker's Hospital Review and sponsored by Qventus, Courtney Vose, DNP, MBA, RN, APRN, NEA-BC, vice president and chief nursing officer of NewYork-Presbyterian, and Ryan Starks, MBA, senior product marketing manager at Qventus, discussed how NewYork-Presbyterian deployed the Qventus platform and the three most important lessons the health system learned in the process. Systems like Qventus' may be high-tech, but traditional leadership roles are still necessary in order to glean the most benefit from these platforms and drive actual change, according to Mr. Starks.

Wheat Ridge, Colorado-based Lutheran Medical Center, which is part of Broomfield, Colorado-based SCL Health, wanted to improve its operations. "We determined a few years ago that for a hospital like ours that has a very challenging payer mix, … running an extremely cost-efficient operation was necessary for stability," said Lutheran Medical Center president and CEO Grant Wicklund in a phone interview. "One of the ways we identified we could become even more cost-efficient was to be absolutely world-class at having the appropriate length of stay." Noomi Hirsch, the medical center's vice president of operations, took the lead on the effort. In a phone interview, she explained that the organization was able to hit low-hanging fruit areas, but eventually started looking at options in the technology world to tackle the problem.

El Camino Hospital, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, has a problem. Its nurses, tending to patients amid a chorus of machines, monitors, and devices, are only human. One missed signal from, say, a call light--the bedside button patients press when they need help--could set in motion a chain of actions that end in a fall. "As fast as we all run to these bed alarms, sometimes we can't get there in time," says Cheryl Reinking, chief nursing officer at El Camino. Falls are dangerous and costly.

Bessemer Venture Partners is launching a $10 million early-stage seed program to back new startups in the healthcare industry. According to TechCrunch, the company's celebrity healthcare investor, Steve Kraus, and its head of investments in Israel, Adam Fisher, will lead the Deep Health Seed Program to invest anywhere between $100,000 and $2 million into startups using machine learning to solve problems in healthcare. The firm has already invested in Qventus, a hospital management service, as well as healthcare companies such as Allena Pharmaceuticals, Docent Health, OvaScience, Verastem and Flex Pharma. Bessemer will specifically be looking for investment opportunities in workflow automation startups like Qventus; digital diagnostics companies that augment or replace human diagnosticians with algorithms; and predictive and programmatic tools to measure and monitor population health. In addition to announcing the new seed funding program, Bessemer also revealed its first investment in a company called Subtle Medical, which is focused on stroke and neurological disorders, improving the quality and speed of medical imaging exams by enhancing the use of lower-quality scans, which will remove the need for repeat imaging procedures.

Seeing a tremendous opportunity to leverage machine learning technologies in the healthcare industry, Bessemer Venture Partners is launching a $10 million early-stage seed program to back new startups. Led by the firm's celebrity healthcare investor, Steve Kraus (seriously: the guy has his own podcast), and its head of investments in Israel, Adam Fisher, the Deep Health Seed Program will place bets of anywhere between $100,000 and $2 million into early-stage companies using machine learning to solve problems in healthcare. It's no exaggeration to say that machine learning can transform the healthcare industry entirely. The proliferation of data brought on by the increasing digitization of workflows in hospitals, patient information, the popularization of wearables and mapping of the human genome means that everything from the health of populations to the genetic composition of our cells can be monitored -- and potentially managed through the application of data. Bessemer has already placed several bets on this hypothesis, including its investment in Qventus (a hospital management service that we'd covered last month).

With mounting pressure from both public and private sectors to avoid patient harm and lower costs, reducing length of stay had become a top priority for hospitals and health systems across the nation. Yet effecting change can be challenging due to the complex and multi-layered nature of the problem, and the many disciplines that need to be involved in the solution. Hospital leaders are bombarded with options for solving LOS and are left wondering which ones will really move the needle – today, not months from now. Join Diane Karagory, Managing Director of Huron Consulting Group and Dr. Rahul Agarwal of Qventus, to learn about the new approaches that leading organizations are taking to improve discharges and tackle LOS issues.