Saving lives through the more intelligent use of healthcare data: PeraHealth

The Rothman Story: One Family's Loss Inspired a Purpose

Florence Rothman was diagnosed with aortic stenosis, which is a narrowing of the exit of the left ventricle of the heart. It’s a condition that typically worsens over time, with symptoms building gradually. Exercise becomes more difficult.

Florence experienced constant fatigue and hoped to gain relief. A low-risk surgical procedure was available, which promised to dramatically improve her quality of life. With thoughtful preparation, she proceeded to have the surgery. After the procedure, she seemed to be recovering nicely, meeting all the existing benchmarks and looking forward to going home. However, by day four, she became weaker and went through a slow, steady decline that was not detected until her condition became critical.

Unfortunately, four days later she collapsed and died in the ER from a relatively common, treatable complication that had gone unnoticed and undiagnosed. Florence did not die from a lack of effort. The hospital was a top quality facility with skilled and well-intentioned doctors and nurses. They just lacked a utility that allowed them to see trends in patient health over time. 

“Those trends were visible in the EHR data, but that data went unused.”

After the death of their Florence, her sons, Michael and Steven Rothman felt that while the doctors and nurses who cared for Florence had been competent and attentive, the system itself had failed their mother. Her slow deterioration over time was not apparent to the many nurses and physicians who saw her over the course of time, despite the wealth of data captured in the EHR. It became clear to Michael and Steven that the data was essentially stored in the EHR, but not synthesized into meaningful information to actively help clinicians. 

That was a huge turning point in Michael and Steven’s life. The loss of their mother turned into PeraHealth's founding purpose.

The Rothman Index (RI)

Florence’s sons, Michael and Steven Rothman, an engineer and a scientist skilled in data analysis, were inspired to give a voice to the EHR, to use existing data to improve healthcare, to create meaning from loss. They devoted their time to finding a preventative solution: the Rothman Index (RI), a statistically validated patient acuity score across all diseases and conditions. The patient acuity score represents a patient’s condition in real time and can be trended and visualized, warning care providers of deterioration before it becomes critical.

Today, over 10,000 patients per day benefit from the Rothman Index, giving Florence’s avoidable death meaning and PeraHealth purpose.

The Rothman Index (RI) is at the forefront of predictive analytics in healthcare. The RI is the only general measure of patient condition and is integral to an array of effective predictive analytics in healthcare. It leverages the investment hospitals have made in electronic health records (EHRs), utilizing existing, real-time data to quantify and visualize patient acuity and risk.

The RI is based on a heuristic model that uses a range of physiological measures, including labs, vitals, and most importantly nursing assessments. The model transforms each input into a common representation of univariate risk, allowing heterogeneous data to be summed, solving the data fusion problem. The result is a continuous measure of patient condition, integrated into the EHR, computed on a real-time basis across all conditions, diseases and care settings.

The First-Rate PeraHealth Solutions

“We live to save lives”

Keeping their motto alive, PeraHealth provides the best solutions in the industry. The solutions are integrated with all major EHR vendors, enabling care providers to monitor patients at the unit, hospital, and system-level.

PeraTrend

PeraTrend provides clinicians with a visual dashboard of the patient’s condition in real-time, helping them to detect subtle changes before they become life-threatening. Powered by the Rothman Index (RI), PeraTrend™ can be easily accessed via a web browser, integrated into a provider’s electronic health record (EHR), or accessed via a web-based dedicated kiosk display. It conveniently works at the individual patient level as well as the nursing unit or facility level for real-time clinical surveillance.

PeraAnalytics

PeraAnalytics is a retrospective analytics platform with ready-to-review dashboards to help benchmark and visualize quality improvement over time. PeraAnalytics offers pre-determined patient populations and the ability to drill into patient encounters for insight into unexpected events and assistance with retrospective root cause analysis.

Leveraging the Rothman Index (RI), PeraAnalytics allows quality and analytics leaders to identify areas for enhancing care delivery, as well as opportunities for improved patient and population outcomes.

From Rothman Healthcare to PeraHealth

In 2013, with the addition of CEO, Stephanie Alexander, the next phase of the company began and Rothman Healthcare evolved to PeraHealth. The entire team of the firm expanded to include industry experts in software development, research, clinical services, and other functions.

Today, PeraHealth offers a range of clinical surveillance solutions. Over 80 leading hospitals and care providers utilize the Rothman Index, including Yale New Haven Health System, Houston Methodist, and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia of UPMC, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Mission Health. Building on the Rothman brother's founding purpose, PeraHealth is continuing to transform healthcare through the intelligent use of data.

Greet the Elegant Lady

Stephanie Alexander is the Chief Executive Officer of PeraHealth.

A 30-year veteran of the healthcare industry, Stephanie has broken new ground pioneering clinical and financial benchmarking systems, developing strategic growth plans for healthcare performance improvement companies, and managing acquisitions.

While at Premier Inc., a healthcare alliance, Stephanie led transformational change. Over two decades, she led performance improvement consulting services and ultimately grew the healthcare informatics business serving over 1,000 hospitals. She pioneered the development of Premier’s Perspective system, the largest clinical benchmarking database of its kind in the U.S.

"The Rothman Index really intrigued me. I realized its potential to transform care and thought this is something that needs to be in every hospital, in every healthcare setting, and even in the home."