Clinical Informatics Fellows Program

Abstract

careMESH, a rapidly growing Health Information Technology company, offers virtual Elective Rotations for Clinical Informatics Fellows seeking experience in a technology startup. Fellows may also use the company’s National Provider Directory platform (“SEARCH”) or Care Coordination and Task Management Epic App (“NAVIGATE”) to support research and benefit their fellowship.

Background

careMESH is a physician-founded company that launched its platform in 2017. It became the first organization with a cloud- and SaaS-based National Provider Directory built entirely on the HL7® FHIR® R4 standard. Upon the system's launch in 2019, Charles Jaffe, CEO of HL7, commented: “As the communities of FHIR implementation grow, we are committed to supporting innovative approaches such as this to enable more seamless information exchange and drive better health outcomes.”

Now called SEARCH, the careMESH directory uses mature master data management processes to compile data from over 650 verified sources. It is used by dozens of organizations—including Tampa General Hospital, St. Joseph’s Health (NJ), District of Columbia Health Information Exchange, NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Health Plans, and other Provider Groups.

SEARCH reduces or eliminates hospitals' EHR provider directory maintenance burden, typically requiring 2-3 FTEs. Inaccurate data leads to compliance issues, delayed care coordination, and staff burnout, ultimately impacting patient outcomes. careMESH customers use SEARCH as a fully-managed Epic directory to streamline processes such as Epic’s Provider On-the-Fly, Compare, Unverified Provider Maintenance (UPM), and others. SEARCH drives the automated delivery of Referrals, Discharges, Transitions of Care, Results, and Medical Record Requests through careMESH CONNECT messaging services.

careMESH also offers a unique and powerful care coordination software as an Epic App—NAVIGATE. It enables sophisticated and graphical task management for clinical programs to manage patient workflows, leveraging directory and messaging services. Analogous to Jira but designed to enhance the automation of clinical care pathways, NAVIGATE brings clear visibility to specialty programs about where patients are in the treatment process: from clinic scheduling to procedure to follow-ups. It has already supported care for thousands of patients and is used by dozens of clinical service line programs such as Heart & Vascular, Thyroid & Parathyroid, Breast Oncology, Limb Preservation, and other programs.

Fellowship Opportunities

  1. Elective Fellowship Rotations:

careMESH is offering flexible, elective rotations to Clinical Informatics Fellows seeking exposure to a Health IT startup environment or who have an interest in National Provider Directories, FHIR, Cloud-based Epic add-ins, Care Coordination, and or other aspects of HealthIT businesses.

The program is designed to be flexible and virtual and can be tailored to meet the needs and interests of each participating Fellow. It can operate like a traditional 1- or 2-month Rotation, or it can be part-time over many months or the duration of the fellowship.

The Fellow might leverage careMESH engineering, customer support, clinical workflow, product management, or sales and marketing. S/he may also further their fellowship work by learning careMESH capabilities and helping with careMESH software, strategy, or other development. S/he may also extend careMESH capabilities for their planned use of the technologies for their fellowship work.

* Research historical careMESH data or customer use cases

* Design and setup the product(s) for their fellowship work

* Content creation or product work

* Process design, workflow improvements, etc

* Market or technology integration research

2. careMESH Products:

careMESH aims to support Clinical Informatics Fellows as they document and publish findings in abstracts, conference posters, case reports, or other formats during their 2-year fellowship. Two careMESH products are available for this use:

  • SEARCH (National Provider Directory)

- Includes over 6.2M individual practitioner and organizational listings—the most comprehensive available in the market. Because it is built entirely on FHIR, with full API access, projects are supported across provider, organization, and location domains, with information easily integrated into almost any app or system. 

- The only directory that provides both provider content and automated cloud services to maintain, score, and synthesize master data from that content along with locally provided information.  

- Provides a graphic workflow management hub, task reminders, and fully configurable and editable workflows to help clerical and clinical support staff streamline their patient data gathering, tracking, and communication.

- All referrals from inbound web forms, faxes, internal messaging, and Direct messaging can be captured in a central Hub and tracked through treatment and follow-up.

- Helps coordinate scheduling, ordering, and review both inside and outside the organization—to speed and organize the myriad tasks required on the care pathway to milestone patient treatment, procedures and interventions.

The Offers

As part of this offering to Clinical Informatics Fellows, careMESH will share product documentation and provide access to these products for research through no- or low-cost subscriptions. Examples of possible studies include:

  • SEARCH is available for evaluation and analysis via FHIR API access, iFrame, or Web App for developing healthcare-related applications.

    For example, any app or process that requires finding a prescribing provider (such as an MD, DO, PA, NP) or other caregiver by name or partial name, location, etc. Current customers use SEARCH to support improved care coordination, provider-to-provider communication, patient outcomes, and more.

  • NAVIGATE is readily integrated into Epic via the careMESH app, which can be installed into Epic with minimal effort. One or more clinical programs could then use the NAVIGATE Hub to manage inbound referrals, track results, and leverage ongoing real-time analytics and reporting.

    There is an opportunity for one or more Clinical Informatics Fellows to identify and document evidence of financial, timing, or clinical program outcomes potentially improved by NAVIGATE. Improvements that could be documented include:

    * Time to intervention 

    * Reduce readmissions

    * Manage wound care and other chronic conditions 

    * Reduce the cost of care for complex care pathways.

    * Improve hospital or departmental operating margins

    * Improved patient outcomes

    * Reduced patient decompensation  

    * Reduced “lost to follow up”

Product Usage

Clinical Informatics Fellows and their institutions will be granted a license to use the careMESH product(s) after the Research Use Case is finalized between the careMESH Coordinator and the Fellow. The careMESH license term will be stipulated in the agreement and generally terminate when the Fellowship ends.

Grants or Funding

careMESH does not provide grants or other funding. Limited Travel and Conference expenses for the Clinical Informatics Fellow(s) may be reimbursable in order to present research results, a poster, paper, or similar with permission from the careMESH coordinator.

Getting Started

Click HERE to send your name, institution, email address, phone number, and potential area of interest to the careMESH Clinical Informatics Fellows Coordinator, who will arrange a conference call, during which he will provide a demonstration of relevant careMESH products and capabilities, answer questions, explain next steps, and otherwise support you in information-gathering and refining your proposal. The careMESH Coordinator may include other careMESH personnel and/or clinical subject-matter experts in this discussion. If your facility requires a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) or other legal approvals, the careMESH Coordinator will manage that process.

After initial discussion(s), the Clinical Informatics Fellow will document a proposed Use Case brief for the use of careMESH product or technology and submit it to careMESH. The Fellow will also coordinate approvals for the research project within his or her own Clinical Informatics fellowship program and with his/her facility’s IT department if support will be required.

careMESH team members are available to support you throughout product implementation and ongoing usage within your program and/or organization.